doc/manual/source/release-notes/rl-1.8.md
Breaking change: to address a race condition, the remote build hook
mechanism now uses nix-store --serve on the remote machine. This requires build slaves to be
updated to Nix 1.8.
Nix now uses HTTPS instead of HTTP to access the default binary
cache, cache.nixos.org.
nix-env selectors are now regular expressions. For instance, you
can do
$ nix-env -qa '.*zip.*'
to query all packages with a name containing zip.
nix-store --read-log can now fetch remote build logs. If a build
log is not available locally, then ‘nix-store -l’ will now try to
download it from the servers listed in the ‘log-servers’ option in
nix.conf. For instance, if you have the configuration option
log-servers = http://hydra.nixos.org/log
then it will try to get logs from http://hydra.nixos.org/log/base name of the store path. This allows you to do things like:
$ nix-store -l $(which xterm)
and get a log even if xterm wasn't built locally.
New builtin functions: attrValues, deepSeq, fromJSON,
readDir, seq.
nix-instantiate --eval now has a --json flag to print the
resulting value in JSON format.
nix-copy-closure now uses nix-store --serve on the remote side
to send or receive closures. This fixes a race condition between
nix-copy-closure and the garbage collector.
Derivations can specify the new special attribute
allowedRequisites, which has a similar meaning to
allowedReferences. But instead of only enforcing to explicitly
specify the immediate references, it requires the derivation to
specify all the dependencies recursively (hence the name,
requisites) that are used by the resulting output.
On Mac OS X, Nix now handles case collisions when importing closures from case-sensitive file systems. This is mostly useful for running NixOps on Mac OS X.
The Nix daemon has new configuration options allowed-users
(specifying the users and groups that are allowed to connect to the
daemon) and trusted-users (specifying the users and groups that
can perform privileged operations like specifying untrusted binary
caches).
The configuration option build-cores now defaults to the number of
available CPU cores.
Build users are now used by default when Nix is invoked as root. This prevents builds from accidentally running as root.
Nix now includes systemd units and Upstart jobs.
Speed improvements to nix-store --optimise.
Language change: the == operator now ignores string contexts (the
“dependencies” of a string).
Nix now filters out Nix-specific ANSI escape sequences on standard error. They are supposed to be invisible, but some terminals show them anyway.
Various commands now automatically pipe their output into the pager
as specified by the PAGER environment variable.
Several improvements to reduce memory consumption in the evaluator.
This release has contributions from Adam Szkoda, Aristid Breitkreuz, Bob van der Linden, Charles Strahan, darealshinji, Eelco Dolstra, Gergely Risko, Joel Taylor, Ludovic Courtès, Marko Durkovic, Mikey Ariel, Paul Colomiets, Ricardo M. Correia, Ricky Elrod, Robert Helgesson, Rob Vermaas, Russell O'Connor, Shea Levy, Shell Turner, Sönke Hahn, Steve Purcell, Vladimír Čunát and Wout Mertens.