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+<chapter 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-basic-package-mgmt">
+
+<title>Basic Package Management</title>
+
+<para>The main command for package management is <link
+linkend="sec-nix-env"><command>nix-env</command></link>.  You can use
+it to install, upgrade, and erase packages, and to query what
+packages are installed or are available for installation.</para>
+
+<para>In Nix, different users can have different “views”
+on the set of installed applications.  That is, there might be lots of
+applications present on the system (possibly in many different
+versions), but users can have a specific selection of those active —
+where “active” just means that it appears in a directory
+in the user’s <envar>PATH</envar>.  Such a view on the set of
+installed applications is called a <emphasis>user
+environment</emphasis>, which is just a directory tree consisting of
+symlinks to the files of the active applications.  </para>
+
+<para>Components are installed from a set of <emphasis>Nix
+expressions</emphasis> that tell Nix how to build those packages,
+including, if necessary, their dependencies.  There is a collection of
+Nix expressions called the Nixpkgs package collection that contains
+packages ranging from basic development stuff such as GCC and Glibc,
+to end-user applications like Mozilla Firefox.  (Nix is however not
+tied to the Nixpkgs package collection; you could write your own Nix
+expressions based on Nixpkgs, or completely new ones.)</para>
+
+<para>You can manually download the latest version of Nixpkgs from
+<link xlink:href='http://nixos.org/nixpkgs/download.html'/>. However,
+it’s much more convenient to use the Nixpkgs
+<emphasis>channel</emphasis>, since it makes it easy to stay up to
+date with new versions of Nixpkgs. (Channels are described in more
+detail in <xref linkend="sec-channels"/>.) Nixpkgs is automatically
+added to your list of “subscribed” channels when you install
+Nix. If this is not the case for some reason, you can add it as
+follows:
+
+<screen>
+$ nix-channel --add https://nixos.org/channels/nixpkgs-unstable
+$ nix-channel --update
+</screen>
+
+</para>
+
+<note><para>On NixOS, you’re automatically subscribed to a NixOS
+channel corresponding to your NixOS major release
+(e.g. <uri>http://nixos.org/channels/nixos-14.12</uri>). A NixOS
+channel is identical to the Nixpkgs channel, except that it contains
+only Linux binaries and is updated only if a set of regression tests
+succeed.</para></note>
+
+<para>You can view the set of available packages in Nixpkgs:
+
+<screen>
+$ nix-env -qa
+aterm-2.2
+bash-3.0
+binutils-2.15
+bison-1.875d
+blackdown-1.4.2
+bzip2-1.0.2
+…</screen>
+
+The flag <option>-q</option> specifies a query operation, and
+<option>-a</option> means that you want to show the “available” (i.e.,
+installable) packages, as opposed to the installed packages. If you
+downloaded Nixpkgs yourself, or if you checked it out from GitHub,
+then you need to pass the path to your Nixpkgs tree using the
+<option>-f</option> flag:
+
+<screen>
+$ nix-env -qaf <replaceable>/path/to/nixpkgs</replaceable>
+</screen>
+
+where <replaceable>/path/to/nixpkgs</replaceable> is where you’ve
+unpacked or checked out Nixpkgs.</para>
+
+<para>You can select specific packages by name:
+
+<screen>
+$ nix-env -qa firefox
+firefox-34.0.5
+firefox-with-plugins-34.0.5
+</screen>
+
+and using regular expressions:
+
+<screen>
+$ nix-env -qa 'firefox.*'
+</screen>
+
+</para>
+
+<para>It is also possible to see the <emphasis>status</emphasis> of
+available packages, i.e., whether they are installed into the user
+environment and/or present in the system:
+
+<screen>
+$ nix-env -qas
+…
+-PS bash-3.0
+--S binutils-2.15
+IPS bison-1.875d
+…</screen>
+
+The first character (<literal>I</literal>) indicates whether the
+package is installed in your current user environment.  The second
+(<literal>P</literal>) indicates whether it is present on your system
+(in which case installing it into your user environment would be a
+very quick operation).  The last one (<literal>S</literal>) indicates
+whether there is a so-called <emphasis>substitute</emphasis> for the
+package, which is Nix’s mechanism for doing binary deployment.  It
+just means that Nix knows that it can fetch a pre-built package from
+somewhere (typically a network server) instead of building it
+locally.</para>
+
+<para>You can install a package using <literal>nix-env -i</literal>.
+For instance,
+
+<screen>
+$ nix-env -i subversion</screen>
+
+will install the package called <literal>subversion</literal> (which
+is, of course, the <link
+xlink:href='http://subversion.tigris.org/'>Subversion version
+management system</link>).</para>
+
+<note><para>When you ask Nix to install a package, it will first try
+to get it in pre-compiled form from a <emphasis>binary
+cache</emphasis>. By default, Nix will use the binary cache
+<uri>https://cache.nixos.org</uri>; it contains binaries for most
+packages in Nixpkgs. Only if no binary is available in the binary
+cache, Nix will build the package from source. So if <literal>nix-env
+-i subversion</literal> results in Nix building stuff from source,
+then either the package is not built for your platform by the Nixpkgs
+build servers, or your version of Nixpkgs is too old or too new. For
+instance, if you have a very recent checkout of Nixpkgs, then the
+Nixpkgs build servers may not have had a chance to build everything
+and upload the resulting binaries to
+<uri>https://cache.nixos.org</uri>. The Nixpkgs channel is only
+updated after all binaries have been uploaded to the cache, so if you
+stick to the Nixpkgs channel (rather than using a Git checkout of the
+Nixpkgs tree), you will get binaries for most packages.</para></note>
+
+<para>Naturally, packages can also be uninstalled:
+
+<screen>
+$ nix-env -e subversion</screen>
+
+</para>
+
+<para>Upgrading to a new version is just as easy.  If you have a new
+release of Nix Packages, you can do:
+
+<screen>
+$ nix-env -u subversion</screen>
+
+This will <emphasis>only</emphasis> upgrade Subversion if there is a
+“newer” version in the new set of Nix expressions, as
+defined by some pretty arbitrary rules regarding ordering of version
+numbers (which generally do what you’d expect of them).  To just
+unconditionally replace Subversion with whatever version is in the Nix
+expressions, use <parameter>-i</parameter> instead of
+<parameter>-u</parameter>; <parameter>-i</parameter> will remove
+whatever version is already installed.</para>
+
+<para>You can also upgrade all packages for which there are newer
+versions:
+
+<screen>
+$ nix-env -u</screen>
+
+</para>
+
+<para>Sometimes it’s useful to be able to ask what
+<command>nix-env</command> would do, without actually doing it.  For
+instance, to find out what packages would be upgraded by
+<literal>nix-env -u</literal>, you can do
+
+<screen>
+$ nix-env -u --dry-run
+(dry run; not doing anything)
+upgrading `libxslt-1.1.0' to `libxslt-1.1.10'
+upgrading `graphviz-1.10' to `graphviz-1.12'
+upgrading `coreutils-5.0' to `coreutils-5.2.1'</screen>
+
+</para>
+
+</chapter>