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Release 2.2 (2019-01-11)

This is primarily a bug fix release. It also has the following changes:

  • In derivations that use structured attributes (i.e. that specify set the __structuredAttrs attribute to true to cause all attributes to be passed to the builder in JSON format), you can now specify closure checks per output, e.g.:

    outputChecks."out" = {
  ## The closure of 'out' must not be larger than 256 MiB.
  maxClosureSize = 256 * 1024 * 1024;

  ## It must not refer to C compiler or to the 'dev' output.
  disallowedRequisites = [ stdenv.cc "dev" ];
};

outputChecks."dev" = {
  ## The 'dev' output must not be larger than 128 KiB.
  maxSize = 128 * 1024;
};

  • The derivation attribute requiredSystemFeatures is now enforced for local builds, and not just to route builds to remote builders. The supported features of a machine can be specified through the configuration setting system-features.

    By default, system-features includes kvm if /dev/kvm exists. For compatibility, it also includes the pseudo-features nixos-test, benchmark and big-parallel which are used by Nixpkgs to route builds to particular Hydra build machines.

  • Sandbox builds are now enabled by default on Linux.

  • The new command nix doctor shows potential issues with your Nix installation.

  • The fetchGit builtin function now uses a caching scheme that puts different remote repositories in distinct local repositories, rather than a single shared repository. This may require more disk space but is faster.

  • The dirOf builtin function now works on relative paths.

  • Nix now supports SRI hashes, allowing the hash algorithm and hash to be specified in a single string. For example, you can write:

    import <nix/fetchurl.nix> {
  url = https://nixos.org/releases/nix/nix-2.1.3/nix-2.1.3.tar.xz;
  hash = "sha256-XSLa0FjVyADWWhFfkZ2iKTjFDda6mMXjoYMXLRSYQKQ=";
};

    instead of

    import <nix/fetchurl.nix> {
  url = https://nixos.org/releases/nix/nix-2.1.3/nix-2.1.3.tar.xz;
  sha256 = "5d22dad058d5c800d65a115f919da22938c50dd6ba98c5e3a183172d149840a4";
};

    In fixed-output derivations, the outputHashAlgo attribute is no longer mandatory if outputHash specifies the hash.

    nix hash-file and nix hash-path now print hashes in SRI format by default. They also use SHA-256 by default instead of SHA-512 because that's what we use most of the time in Nixpkgs.

  • Integers are now 64 bits on all platforms.

  • The evaluator now prints profiling statistics (enabled via the NIX_SHOW_STATS and NIX_COUNT_CALLS environment variables) in JSON format.

  • The option --xml in nix-store --query has been removed. Instead, there now is an option --graphml to output the dependency graph in GraphML format.

  • All nix-* commands are now symlinks to nix. This saves a bit of disk space.

  • nix repl now uses libeditline or libreadline.