Nix 0.6 (2004-11-14) - Lix Reference Manual

# Release 0.6 (2004-11-14)

- Rewrite of the normalisation engine.

  - Multiple builds can now be performed in parallel (option `-j`).

  - Distributed builds. Nix can now call a shell script to forward builds to Nix installations on remote machines, which may or may not be of the same platform type.

  - Option `--fallback` allows recovery from broken substitutes.

  - Option `--keep-going` causes building of other (unaffected) derivations to continue if one failed.

- Improvements to the garbage collector (i.e., it should actually work now).

- Setuid Nix installations allow a Nix store to be shared among multiple users.

- Substitute registration is much faster now.

- A utility `nix-build` to build a Nix expression and create a symlink to the result int the current directory; useful for testing Nix derivations.

- Manual updates.

- `nix-env` changes:

  - Derivations for other platforms are filtered out (which can be overridden using `--system-filter`).

  - `--install` by default now uninstall previous derivations with the same name.

  - `--upgrade` allows upgrading to a specific version.

  - New operation `--delete-generations` to remove profile generations (necessary for effective garbage collection).

  - Nicer output (sorted, columnised).

- More sensible verbosity levels all around (builder output is now shown always, unless `-Q` is given).

- Nix expression language changes:

  - New language construct: `with E1; E2` brings all attributes defined in the attribute set E1 in scope in E2.

  - Added a `map` function.

  - Various new operators (e.g., string concatenation).

- Expression evaluation is much faster.

- An Emacs mode for editing Nix expressions (with syntax highlighting and indentation) has been added.

- Many bug fixes.