Releasing NixOS – History, Hummingbird, and Henceforth by fpletz and Robin Gloster (NixCon 2017)
Channel: NixCon
Date: 2017-10-30

As the latest release managers, we will describe how NixOS releases have been done in the past and how we want to encourage the Nix community to participate in the release process. We are going to highlight some interesting new features of past releases and the then brand-new 17.09 'Hummingbird' release. Finally, we present you some ideas for features we would love to see implemented.

We will give you an impression of the NixOS release process, how the release team works (RFC15) and your duties as release manager. Not to scare you away but to motivate you to step up as the next release manager. In particular, we will give you an overview of promising features the community has suggested but remain to be implemented. Some of those are general service hardening with systemd, a new test-runner container backend for quicker service tests and the service abstraction layer to use NixOS service modules in Docker containers or swap init systems.