<section xmlns="http://docbook.org/ns/docbook" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink" xmlns:xi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XInclude" version="5.0" xml:id="ch-relnotes-0.6"> <title>Release 0.6 (2004-11-14)</title> <itemizedlist> <listitem> <para>Rewrite of the normalisation engine. <itemizedlist> <listitem><para>Multiple builds can now be performed in parallel (option <option>-j</option>).</para></listitem> <listitem><para>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.</para></listitem> <listitem><para>Option <option>--fallback</option> allows recovery from broken substitutes.</para></listitem> <listitem><para>Option <option>--keep-going</option> causes building of other (unaffected) derivations to continue if one failed.</para></listitem> </itemizedlist> </para> </listitem> <listitem><para>Improvements to the garbage collector (i.e., it should actually work now).</para></listitem> <listitem><para>Setuid Nix installations allow a Nix store to be shared among multiple users.</para></listitem> <listitem><para>Substitute registration is much faster now.</para></listitem> <listitem><para>A utility <command>nix-build</command> to build a Nix expression and create a symlink to the result int the current directory; useful for testing Nix derivations.</para></listitem> <listitem><para>Manual updates.</para></listitem> <listitem> <para><command>nix-env</command> changes: <itemizedlist> <listitem><para>Derivations for other platforms are filtered out (which can be overridden using <option>--system-filter</option>).</para></listitem> <listitem><para><option>--install</option> by default now uninstall previous derivations with the same name.</para></listitem> <listitem><para><option>--upgrade</option> allows upgrading to a specific version.</para></listitem> <listitem><para>New operation <option>--delete-generations</option> to remove profile generations (necessary for effective garbage collection).</para></listitem> <listitem><para>Nicer output (sorted, columnised).</para></listitem> </itemizedlist> </para> </listitem> <listitem><para>More sensible verbosity levels all around (builder output is now shown always, unless <option>-Q</option> is given).</para></listitem> <listitem> <para>Nix expression language changes: <itemizedlist> <listitem><para>New language construct: <literal>with <replaceable>E1</replaceable>; <replaceable>E2</replaceable></literal> brings all attributes defined in the attribute set <replaceable>E1</replaceable> in scope in <replaceable>E2</replaceable>.</para></listitem> <listitem><para>Added a <function>map</function> function.</para></listitem> <listitem><para>Various new operators (e.g., string concatenation).</para></listitem> </itemizedlist> </para> </listitem> <listitem><para>Expression evaluation is much faster.</para></listitem> <listitem><para>An Emacs mode for editing Nix expressions (with syntax highlighting and indentation) has been added.</para></listitem> <listitem><para>Many bug fixes.</para></listitem> </itemizedlist> </section>