Hi, I'm pleased to announce the availability of the first stable branch of NixOS, namely 13.10 (a.k.a "Aardvark")! The purpose of this branch is to receive only conservative changes, such as bug fixes, "safe" minor package upgrades and new packages [1]. This is important for people who want to use NixOS in a production environment: you do want to get (security) fixes, but you don't want to be afraid of the system changing in fundamental ways, as may be the case on the master branch.

Note that NixOS 13.10 is a branch, not a "release" in the sense of a static revision. Just like the NixOS master branch, it receives updates, just safer ones. The idea is to maintain this branch at least until the next stable branch (14.04?) is created. The 13.10 branch lives here in GitHub: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/tree/release-13.10 It also has an associated channel: http://nixos.org/channels/nixos-13.10 (Notice that versions of releases in the 13.10 channel have no "pre" string, indicating they're stable versions, such as 13.10.35427.6fda96b.) If you want to switch an existing machine from the nixos-unstable channel over to the 13.10 channel, just do: $ nix-channel --add http://nixos.org/channels/nixos-13.10 nixos After this, subsequent calls to "nixos-rebuild switch --upgrade" will fetch from the nixos-13.10 channel. See here for details on switching between NixOS channels: http://nixos.org/nixos/manual/#sec-upgrading Like the nixos-unstable channel (which gets build from the master branch), the 13.10 channel is updated only after Hydra has built all packages and all release-critical tests have succeeded. The Hydra jobset is: http://hydra.nixos.org/jobset/nixos/release-13.10 and the status of the release-critical jobs can be seen here: http://hydra.nixos.org/job/nixos/release-13.10/tested#tabs-constituents The plan for maintaining the branch is that it will primarily receive cherry-picked commits from master. Other than that, doing a stable branch is an experiment, and we'll have to see what the best way to do it is. Any feedback/suggestions are welcome. On that topic, now is probably a good time to start thinking about what the next release should look like, in terms of features. If you have any features (especially potentially high-impact ones like upgrading GCC) that you would like to see, please create GitHub issues for them, and add them to the 14.0x milestone: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues?milestone=4&state=open [1] New major versions of existing packages are also fine as long as they are marked as "lowPrio" in all-packages.nix. That is, "nix-env -i package" should continue to install the old version. -- Eelco Dolstra | LogicBlox, Inc. | http://nixos.org/~eelco/ _______________________________________________ nix-dev mailing list nix-dev@lists.science.uu.nl http://lists.science.uu.nl/mailman/listinfo/nix-dev