nixpkgs/doc/release-notes.xml
Eelco Dolstra 082d8e6796 * Release notes.
svn path=/nixpkgs/trunk/; revision=4632
2006-01-31 11:41:44 +00:00

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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. Among the more notable are:</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The old, unofficial Xlibs has been replaced by the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. We use a fully Nixified X server on
NixOS.</para></listitem>
<listitem><para>The Sun JDK 5 has been purified, i.e., it doesnt
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 parted 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>
</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>