# Nixpkgs Release Notes

## Release 0.9 (January 31, 2006)

There have been zillions of changes since the last release of Nixpkgs. Many packages have been added or updated. The following are some of the more notable changes:

- Distribution files have been moved to .

- The C library on Linux, Glibc, has been updated to version 2.3.6.

- The default compiler is now GCC 3.4.5. GCC 4.0.2 is also available.

- The old, unofficial Xlibs has been replaced by the official modularised X11 distribution from X.org, i.e., X11R7.0. X11R7.0 consists of 287 (!) packages, all of which are in Nixpkgs though not all have been tested. It is now possible to build a working X server (previously we only had X client libraries). We use a fully Nixified X server on NixOS.

- The Sun JDK 5 has been purified, i.e., it doesn't require any non-Nix components such as `/lib/ld-linux.so.2`. This means that Java applications such as Eclipse and Azureus can run on NixOS.

- Hardware-accelerated OpenGL support, used by games like Quake 3 (which is now built from source).

- Improved support for FreeBSD on x86.

- Improved Haskell support; e.g., the GHC build is now pure.

- Some support for cross-compilation: cross-compiling builds of GCC and Binutils, and cross-compiled builds of the C library uClibc.

- Notable new packages:

  - teTeX, including support for building LaTeX documents using Nix (with automatic dependency determination).

  - Ruby.

  - System-level packages to support NixOS, e.g. Grub, GNU `parted` and so on.

  - `ecj`, the Eclipse Compiler for Java, so we finally have a freely distributable compiler that supports Java 5.0.

  - `php`.

  - The GIMP.

  - Inkscape.

  - GAIM.

  - `kdelibs`. This allows us to add KDE-based packages (such as `kcachegrind`).

The following people contributed to this release:

Andres Löh, Armijn Hemel, Bogdan Dumitriu, Christof Douma, Eelco Dolstra, Eelco Visser, Mart Kolthof, Martin Bravenboer, Rob Vermaas and Roy van den Broek.

## Release 0.8 (April 11, 2005)

This release is mostly to remain synchronised with the changed hashing scheme in Nix 0.8.

Notable updates:

- Adobe Reader 7.0

- Various security updates (zlib 1.2.2, etc.)

## Release 0.7 (March 14, 2005)

- The bootstrap process for the standard build environment on Linux (stdenv-linux) has been improved. It is no longer dependent in its initial bootstrap stages on the system Glibc, GCC, and other tools. Rather, Nixpkgs contains a statically linked bash and curl, and uses that to download other statically linked tools. These are then used to build a Glibc and dynamically linked versions of all other tools.

  This change also makes the bootstrap process faster. For instance, GCC is built only once instead of three times.

  (Contributed by Armijn Hemel.)

- Tarballs used by Nixpkgs are now obtained from the same server that hosts Nixpkgs (). This reduces the risk of packages being unbuildable due to moved or deleted files on various servers.

- There now is a generic mechanism for building Perl modules. See the various Perl modules defined in pkgs/system/all-packages-generic.nix.

- Notable new packages:

  - Qt 3

  - MySQL

  - MythTV

  - Mono

  - MonoDevelop (alpha)

  - Xine

- Notable updates:

  - GCC 3.4.3

  - Glibc 2.3.4

  - GTK 2.6