ab4281e967
The concept of having a "minimum supported Nix version" doesn't work anymore today, for the following reasons: - With multiple forks / implementations of Nix available, their feature sets and versions will differ. We'd need *multiple* minimum versions, one for each implementation. - Lix does not expose its real version. It only reports "2.18.3-lix", even though its real version is in the 2.90+ range. - A minimum version has the expectation that it could be *raised* in the future. That's not possible with Lix, because Lix will always and forever report the above version. - A minimum version has the expectation that *all* versions bigger than the minimum are supported. That was already quite a stretch when minver was 2.3 and none of the Nix versions between 2.4 and 2.23 were packed anymore. But it's impossible for us to test all these non-LTS versions anyway: We don't have Nix 2.18, 2.19, 2.20, 2.21, 2.22, 2.23, 2.25, 2.26 and 2.27 available in Nixpkgs at the time of this writing. With their policy around `builtins.nixVersion`, Lix forces our hand: We need to replace minver.nix with a "feature detection" mechanism. This PR introduces the first two features: - The availability of `builtins.nixVersion`: If this is not available, the version of Nix is so old, that we surely don't support it anymore. - The value of `builtins.nixVersion` being greater or equal to 2.18. Note, that this does **not** imply support for Nix 2.18. Instead, explicitly supported versions of Lix and Nix are only these that we actually test against. If, eventually, we realize that the supported versions have advanced and Nixpkgs has adopted a feature only available in newer versions, we will have to add a feature check for this. Put differently: The list of features in `minfeatures.nix` is not expected to be complete. It's a list of known-to-be-bad conditions that will cause problems when evaluating Nixpkgs. Their only purpose is to be able to show a helpful error message. Some other versions might also not be supported, but might fail with more subtle errors. That's just reality and has always been the case previously as well.
Nixpkgs is a collection of over 120,000 software packages that can be installed with the Nix package manager. It also implements NixOS, a purely-functional Linux distribution.
Manuals
- NixOS Manual - how to install, configure, and maintain a purely-functional Linux distribution
- Nixpkgs Manual - contributing to Nixpkgs and using programming-language-specific Nix expressions
- Nix Package Manager Manual - how to write Nix expressions (programs), and how to use Nix command line tools
Community
- Discourse Forum
- Matrix Chat
- NixOS Weekly
- Official wiki
- Community-maintained list of ways to get in touch (Discord, Telegram, IRC, etc.)
Other Project Repositories
The sources of all official Nix-related projects are in the NixOS organization on GitHub. Here are some of the main ones:
- Nix - the purely functional package manager
- NixOps - the tool to remotely deploy NixOS machines
- nixos-hardware - NixOS profiles to optimize settings for different hardware
- Nix RFCs - the formal process for making substantial changes to the community
- NixOS homepage - the NixOS.org website
- hydra - our continuous integration system
- NixOS Artwork - NixOS artwork
Continuous Integration and Distribution
Nixpkgs and NixOS are built and tested by our continuous integration system, Hydra.
- Continuous package builds for unstable/master
- Continuous package builds for the NixOS 25.05 release
- Tests for unstable/master
- Tests for the NixOS 25.05 release
Artifacts successfully built with Hydra are published to cache at https://cache.nixos.org/. When successful build and test criteria are met, the Nixpkgs expressions are distributed via Nix channels.
Contributing
Nixpkgs is among the most active projects on GitHub. While thousands of open issues and pull requests might seem a lot at first, it helps consider it in the context of the scope of the project. Nixpkgs describes how to build tens of thousands of pieces of software and implements a Linux distribution. The GitHub Insights page gives a sense of the project activity.
Community contributions are always welcome through GitHub Issues and Pull Requests.
For more information about contributing to the project, please visit the contributing page.
Donations
The infrastructure for NixOS and related projects is maintained by a nonprofit organization, the NixOS Foundation. To ensure the continuity and expansion of the NixOS infrastructure, we are looking for donations to our organization.
You can donate to the NixOS foundation through SEPA bank transfers or by using Open Collective:
License
Nixpkgs is licensed under the MIT License.
Note
MIT license does not apply to the packages built by Nixpkgs, merely to the files in this repository (the Nix expressions, build scripts, NixOS modules, etc.). It also might not apply to patches included in Nixpkgs, which may be derivative works of the packages to which they apply. The aforementioned artifacts are all covered by the licenses of the respective packages.