nixpkgs/doc/release-notes.xml

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<article><title>Nixpkgs Release Notes</title>


<section><title>Release 0.9 (January 31, 2006)</title>

<para>There have been zillions of changes since the last release of
Nixpkgs.  Many packages have been added or updated.  The following are
some of the more notable changes:</para>

<itemizedlist>

  <listitem><para>Distribution files have been moved to <ulink
  url="http://nix.cs.uu.nl/" />.</para></listitem>

  <listitem><para>The C library on Linux, Glibc, has been updated to
  version 2.3.6.</para></listitem>

  <listitem><para>The default compiler is now GCC 3.4.5.  GCC 4.0.2 is
  also available.</para></listitem>

  <listitem><para>The old, unofficial Xlibs has been replaced by the
  official modularised X11 distribution from X.org, i.e., X11R7.0.
  X11R7.0 consists of 287 (!) packages, all of which are in Nixpkgs
  though not all have been tested.  It is now possible to build a
  working X server (previously we only had X client libraries).  We
  use a fully Nixified X server on NixOS.</para></listitem>

  <listitem><para>The Sun JDK 5 has been purified, i.e., it doesn’t
  require any non-Nix components such as
  <filename>/lib/ld-linux.so.2</filename>.  This means that Java
  applications such as Eclipse and Azureus can run on
  NixOS.</para></listitem>

  <listitem><para>Hardware-accelerated OpenGL support, used by games
  like Quake 3 (which is now built from source).</para></listitem>

  <listitem><para>Improved support for FreeBSD on
  x86.</para></listitem>

  <listitem><para>Improved Haskell support; e.g., the GHC build is now
  pure.</para></listitem>

  <listitem><para>Some support for cross-compilation: cross-compiling
  builds of GCC and Binutils, and cross-compiled builds of the C
  library uClibc.</para></listitem>

  <listitem><para>Notable new packages:

    <itemizedlist>

      <listitem><para>teTeX, including support for building LaTeX
      documents using Nix (with automatic dependency
      determination).</para></listitem>
      
      <listitem><para>Ruby.</para></listitem>

      <listitem><para>System-level packages to support NixOS,
      e.g. Grub, GNU <literal>parted</literal> and so
      on.</para></listitem>

      <listitem><para><literal>ecj</literal>, the Eclipse Compiler for
      Java, so we finally have a freely distributable compiler that
      supports Java 5.0.</para></listitem>

      <listitem><para><literal>php</literal>.</para></listitem>

      <listitem><para>The GIMP.</para></listitem>

      <listitem><para>Inkscape.</para></listitem>

      <listitem><para>GAIM.</para></listitem>

      <listitem><para><literal>kdelibs</literal>.  This allows us to
      add KDE-based packages (such as
      <literal>kcachegrind</literal>).</para></listitem>

    </itemizedlist>

  </para></listitem>

</itemizedlist>

<para>The following people contributed to this release:

  Andres Löh,
  Armijn Hemel,
  Bogdan Dumitriu,
  Christof Douma,
  Eelco Dolstra,
  Eelco Visser,
  Mart Kolthof,
  Martin Bravenboer,
  Rob Vermaas and
  Roy van den Broek.

</para>

</section>


<section><title>Release 0.8 (April 11, 2005)</title>

<para>This release is mostly to remain synchronised with the changed
hashing scheme in Nix 0.8.</para>

<para>Notable updates:

<itemizedlist>

  <listitem><para>Adobe Reader 7.0</para></listitem>

  <listitem><para>Various security updates (zlib 1.2.2, etc.)</para></listitem>

</itemizedlist>

</para>

</section>


<section><title>Release 0.7 (March 14, 2005)</title>

<itemizedlist>

<listitem>

  <para>The bootstrap process for the standard build
  environment on Linux (stdenv-linux) has been improved.  It is no
  longer dependent in its initial bootstrap stages on the system
  Glibc, GCC, and other tools.  Rather, Nixpkgs contains a statically
  linked bash and curl, and uses that to download other statically
  linked tools.  These are then used to build a Glibc and dynamically
  linked versions of all other tools.</para>

  <para>This change also makes the bootstrap process faster.  For
  instance, GCC is built only once instead of three times.</para>

  <para>(Contributed by Armijn Hemel.)</para>

</listitem>

<listitem>

  <para>Tarballs used by Nixpkgs are now obtained from the same server
  that hosts Nixpkgs (<ulink url="http://catamaran.labs.cs.uu.nl" />).
  This reduces the risk of packages being unbuildable due to moved or
  deleted files on various servers.</para>

</listitem>

<listitem>

  <para>There now is a generic mechanism for building Perl modules.
  See the various Perl modules defined in
  pkgs/system/all-packages-generic.nix.</para>

</listitem>

<listitem>

  <para>Notable new packages:

  <itemizedlist>

    <listitem><para>Qt 3</para></listitem>
    <listitem><para>MySQL</para></listitem>
    <listitem><para>MythTV</para></listitem>
    <listitem><para>Mono</para></listitem>
    <listitem><para>MonoDevelop (alpha)</para></listitem>
    <listitem><para>Xine</para></listitem>

  </itemizedlist>

  </para>

</listitem>

<listitem>

  <para>Notable updates:

  <itemizedlist>

    <listitem><para>GCC 3.4.3</para></listitem>
    <listitem><para>Glibc 2.3.4</para></listitem>
    <listitem><para>GTK 2.6</para></listitem>

  </itemizedlist>

  </para>

</listitem>

</itemizedlist>

</section>

  
</article>