We at the Lix team are proud to announce our seventh major release, version 2.96 “Bingsu”.
\nThis release focuses on security, debugger support, quality-of-life improvements, and continues the work towards both the new Cap’n’Proto RPC protocol and Rust support.
\nBingsu is a milk-based Korean shaved ice dessert with sweet toppings that may include chopped fruit, condensed milk, fruit syrup, tteok, and red beans.
\nLix is a Nix implementation focused on reliability, predictability, friendliness, developed by a community of people from around the world. We have long term plans to incrementally evolve Nix to work in more places, to make it more reliable and secure, and to update the language and semantics to correct past mistakes and reduce errors, all the while providing an amazing tooling experience.
\nWARNING: We do not recommend to use nix upgrade-nix, please follow the instructions in https://lix.systems/install/ with the Lix’s upgrade shell script.
The upgrade procedure depends on how you installed Lix or CppNix, and is fully described in the Lix installation guide.
\nIf you are using Lix from nixpkgs on NixOS, you just need to upgrade your nixpkgs once the upgrade pull request has passed through the build farm into your channel; no other action is required.
\nIf you want to help us test the next version of Lix, consider running main by following the beta guide.
Lix 2.96 builds on the work of previous releases to improve the daemon, the protocols spoken with the daemon (both on a single machine and the ones used for remote builds), and brings many much-needed improvements to the debugger infrastructure.
\nHere’s a short list of the most exciting changes in Lix 2.96. This list is not as exhaustive as the full release notes.
\nThanks to the tireless work of blokyk the REPL and debugger are much improved in Lix 2.96. The debugger is now more stable, navigating within the debugger is much easier, and the information printed by the debugger is more readable.
\neldritch horrors have also switched the REPL backend from editline to rustyline, finally bringing proper UTF-8 support to the REPL.
\nThe experimental RPC protocol is now shipping under the rpc-sockets experimental feature. As one may guess this is still highly experimental and must be enabled not only with the experimental feature flag in your Lix config, but also requires system setup that is not yet done by the NixOS module. You can find an example configuration in the NixOS module in the Lix repo.
In future releases we plan to stabilize the RPC protocol and remove support for the legacy protocols we’ve been using to date to allow further evolution of Lix.
\nssh:// store URIs are now deprecatedTo enable further RPC work and resolve some long-standing security inconsistencies we must remove ssh:// store URIs. Lix 2.96 deprecates ssh:// store URIs, but retains support for them without deprecation warnings. ssh:// store URI support will be removed in Lix 2.97, ssh-ng:// URIs will remain supported.
If you are using ssh:// store URIs because ssh-ng:// is missing features you need please get in touch so we can figure something out together. Note that ssh-ng has stricter security checks than ssh and no longer allows untrusted users to copy unsigned outputs to remote stores, this is intentional.
Once again Lix must break sharp corners to make improvements possible and excise surprising behavior in user code.
\nflake.nix validation no longer relies on poorly documented triviality checks. Instead Lix now has only one rule forflake.nix :no function calls are allowed outside of outputs. This means that Lix now acceptslet blocks and string interpolation in flakeinputs , among other things. We consider this a breaking change because other Nix implementations may no longer be able to evaluate Flakes that were written using Lix.Many thanks to piegames ,Qyriad andeldritch horrors .floor andceil builtins now throw errors if their operation would have resulted in precision loss during the conversion from floating point to integers. Precision loss does not sound dramatic, but with numbers of sufficient magnitude this could result in positive floats being converted to negative integers.Many thanks to jade ,NaN-git androotile .nix store delete was called with a path that was not present in the store, causing the path to be downloaded just so that it could be deleted.Many thanks to eldritch horrors .nix search path entry due to surprising effects that could have, Lix 2.96 now considers this an error if not explicitly configured otherwise.Many thanks to thubrecht ,jade andeldritch horrors .--arg and--argstr .Previously Lix would turn --arg foo.bar.baz 1 into the set{ "foo.bar.baz" = 1; } , now it turns it into{ foo.bar.baz = 1; } . Attribute set merging rules are applied to these sets, making it much easier to use function that expect sets as arguments (such as nixpkgs, which expects aconfig set). The old behavior can be recovered by quoting the name, e.g.--arg '"foo.bar.baz" 1' .Many thanks to ma27 .nix doctor has been extended greatly, including general system information and remote builder configuration in its report. It can now also automatically connect to configured remote builders and check their state as well.Many thanks to rootile andraito .ssh-ng store URIs are now considered stable. The long-awaited feature parity betweenssh andssh-ng URIs has arrived, although only Lix 2.96 and newer will be able to take full advantage of this. Connecting to or from older Lixes or other Nix implementations will not see feature parity and silently fall back to the previous behavior.Many thanks to eldritch horrors .zst -compressed tarballs. This can greatly improve unpacking speed when using channels.Many thanks to raito andeldritch horrors .ssl-cert-file andnetrc-file settings now report errors when set to files that don’t exist instead of being silently ignored.Many thanks to Astreaprtcl .:st +l to go from framen ton+k and:st -k to go fromn ton-k .Many thanks to blokyk .addErrorContext frames are always printed in backtraces now, even without--show-trace . This makes explicit report locations, for example in the NixOS module system, much more useful.Many thanks to blokyk .nix-copy-closure --include-outputs now actually works.Many thanks to rkjnsn .structuredAttrs . This fixes hash mismatch diagnostics with fetchers from modern nixpkgs.Many thanks to keysmashes .ssh andssh-ng store URIs no longer honor themax-connections parameter. This parameter complicated the code immensely for no benefit to the average user and had many sharp corners when set explicitly.Many thanks to eldritch horrors .daemon-trust-override experimental feature has been removed. It can still be emulated by e.g. setting theNIX_CONFIG environment variable appropriately.Many thanks to eldritch horrors .Many more changes have gone into Lix 2.96, most of them internal. We hope to ship a stable RPC-based daemon in one of the upcoming releases, including remote build support using this new protocol.
\nWe are releasing 2.96 together with security releases on stable branches. A few things we wanted to finish for 2.96 have been delayed somewhat, and we expect to release 2.96.1 with a few more improvements soon:
\n--keep-going support when using--store ssh-ng://... , not just when usingssh-ng remotes as remote builders.narinfo cache soundness improvements to enable key rollovers for binary cacheslog-linesRust integration has moved along apace, and it is now possible to write significant portions of new features without touching too much C++ code. We’ve decided to use zngur for interop due to its great flexibility and active maintenance, and we’ve already ported a number of features to Rust like this. The REPL is now backed by Rust, as is remote builder configuration and much of the hash conversion code.
\nFollowing Lix integration in AFNix, Lix now has an Open Collective and can receive donations.
\nWe run infrastructure across x86_64-linux, aarch64-linux, and aarch64-darwin. Some of it is in-kind and sponsored. Current costs are around 100€/month.
\nIf you value self-hosting and benefit from Lix, please consider donating. Every contribution helps sustain the project.
\nThanks, as always, to the following groups:
\nmain in production since the 2.95 branch-off. We really appreciate having immediate feedback on our work and the trust of running main alongside us means a lot to us. We know we tested the patience of some of you, we thank you for that.If you want to run Lix main yourself, see the beta guide for details.Onwards and upwards for the next release. We look forward to continuing to work together with everyone to build a better foundation for the evolution of Nix.
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