🦦 NixOS 23.05 — Feature Freeze & Release Blockers

[RaitoBezarius]

Hello everyone, we are Ryan Lahfa & Martin Weinelt, the release managers for NixOS 23.05 🦦 ("Stoat").

As we approach the next release of NixOS, it's time to discuss the upcoming feature freeze period. We want to ensure that this release is as stable and reliable as possible, and your contributions are crucial to achieving that goal, here are the two upcoming dates in that context:

• 17th April 2023 (17/04/2023): Restrict breaking changes to Release Critical Packages
• 1st May 2023 (01/05/2023): Restrict all breaking changes except for desktop environments.

The complete timeline is available here:

• 🦦 NixOS 23.05 — Release Schedule #223562

The first restriction will be in place in two weeks, therefore, we encourage all teams to check in now and mention possible roadblocks, so we get a good overview of what's ahead.

Blockers

Whether you were pinged or not, we encourage everyone to create issues for release blockers and add them to the 23.05 Blockers project.

Check-in

Please comment your status quo and possible issues as soon as possible. We'll check teams once they have checked in.

If you think some subsystem, person or team should be added or removed from this list, update maintainers/team-list.nix in time before the next feature freeze announcement.

Desktop environments

• Deepin: @wineee
• Cinnamon: @bobby285271 @mkg20001
• LXQt: @NixOS/lxqt
• Xfce: @romildo @muscaln
• MATE: @johannesloetzsch @romildo
• Enlightenment: @NixOS/enlightenment
• GNOME: @NixOS/gnome
• Qt / KDE: @NixOS/qt-kde
• Lumina: @NixOS/lumina
• Pantheon: @NixOS/pantheon

Platforms

• Darwin: @NixOS/darwin-maintainers
• Mobile: @NixOS/mobile-nixos

Languages ecosystem

• BEAM: @NixOS/beam
• C: @matthewbauer @Mic92
• Coq: @CohenCyril @Zimmi48 @siraben @vbgl @Alizter
• Dhall: @Gabriella439 @ehmry
• Go: @c00w @kalbasit @Mic92 @zowoq @qbit
• Haskell: Haskell: @NixOS/haskell
• Lua: @NixOS/lua
• Perl: @stigtsp
• PHP: @NixOS/php
• Python: @FRidh @mweinelt @jonringer
• R: @bcdarwin @jbedo
• Ruby: @marsam
• Rust: @figsoda @LnL7 @Mic92 @tjni @winterqt @zowoq
• Node.js: @lilyinstarlight @marsam @winterqt @yu-re-ka
• Crystal: @NixOS/crystal-lang
• OCaml: @NixOS/ocaml

Compilers, build systems

• Bazel: @mboes @marsam @uri-canva @avdv @olebedev @groodt @aherrmann @ylecornec
• LLVM: @dtzWill @Ericson2314 @lovek323 @primeos @alyssais @RaitoBezarius @rrbutani @sternenseemann
• CUDA: @NixOS/cuda-maintainers
• ROCm: @NixOS/rocm-maintainers
• Exotic platforms: @NixOS/exotic-platform-maintainers
• Static builds: @NixOS/static

Programs

• Freedesktop: @NixOS/freedesktop
• Geospatial: @NixOS/geospatial
• Kodi: @NixOS/kodi
• Podman: @NixOS/podman
• Kubernetes: @NixOS/kubernetes
• NeoVim: @NixOS/neovim
• emacs: @NixOS/emacs

Modules

• ACME: @aanderse @andrew-d @arianvp @emilazy @flokli @m1cr0man
• systemd: @NixOS/systemd

Installer

• Calamares NixOS extensions: @NixOS/calamares-nixos-extensions

Internals

• Docs: @asymmetric @ryantm
• NixOS Modules / internals: @Ericson2314 @infinisil @alyssais @roberth
• Nix/nix-cli ecosystem: @Profpatsch @edolstra @grahamc @nbp
• NixOS tests: @tfc
• Marketing: @garbas @tomberek

Finally

No issue is too big or too small, but let's remember that we are all working on the project voluntarily in our free time here, so let's focus on issues that can be realistically addressed in the remaining time before the release.

We thank everyone for their contribution!

[bobby285271]

• Budgie: Though there is no release freeze ping team for this, I want to mention that Budgie desktop is now available thanks to @FedericoSchonborn's work.

• Cinnamon: No blockers. We will likely ship 5.6 for 23.05 unfortunately since their release schedule clashes with ours, otherwise we are in good state. Note that cjs 5.8 will support mozjs 102 but cjs 5.6 still uses 78.

• GNOME: I am trying to list some of the blockers I can think of here to get GNOME 44 PR merged, though @jtojnar should know the situation better. Ideally we can also land 44.1, which is scheduled on April 22.

• Pantheon: No blockers. We are now using mutter 43 (in #218143) and all packages are up to date. I am aware of regressions in multitasking view introduced by mutter and glib update and will apply fixes once available.

[DianaOlympos]

BEAM: No blockers. OTP 26 will probably drop after the cutoff, but that is not a problem, people can use nixpkgs directly for this. There is probably a critical patch coming through, for all last 3 versions, but it should be through before the freeze. Not security, just a nasty bug fix. Not announced yet, don't ask how I know about it. But we will backport it anyway if need be.

[RaitoBezarius]

Missed pings due to GitHub limits:

Modules

• ACME: @emilazy @flokli @m1cr0man

Internals

• Docs: @asymmetric @ryantm
• NixOS Modules / internals: @infinisil @roberth
• Nix/nix-cli ecosystem: @Profpatsch @edolstra @grahamc @nbp
• NixOS tests: @tfc
• Marketing: @garbas @tomberek

[tfc]

@RaitoBezarius no blockers on the NixOS tests front.

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/lets-have-a-great-23-05-release-cycle/26795/1

[adisbladis]

Emacs: No blockers. There might be a new Emacs release in between now and feature freeze.
Depending on what the state is closer to the freeze we might release 23.05 with either Emacs 28.3 or 29.1.

[winterqt]

Node.js: We have a few blockers (see my open PRs), but I believe we'll get them squared away very soon (as I've been saying since... December... sorry).

[RaitoBezarius]

LLVM : AFAIK, we are still working towards ~four things:

• Remove unneeded LLVM versions: Prune unused/unneeded/old versions of llvm #44372
• Unify llvmPackages_15 and llvmPackages_git code:
  • llvmPackages_git: apply #190936 (fix pkgsStatic LLVM build) #222901
  • llvmPackages_git: apply #205355 (disable libpfm on non-Linux) #222902
  • llvmPackages_git.openmp: apply #197674 (fix cross compile) #222903
  • llvmPackages_git: bump to LLVM 15 #222894
• Introduce llvmPackages_16: llvmPackages_16: init #223282 -- needed for next version of Chromium M113, planned for 2nd of May, already in beta.
• Upgrade latest to 15: llvmPackages_latest: 14 -> 15 #213202

Of which, 1 is really a blocker: llvmPackages_16 introduction.

[vcunat]

llvmPackages_16 should be fine. Adding new packages tends to be trivially backportable.

[mweinelt]

We don't have any blockers in python currently.

[infinisil]

No blockers for the NixOS Module System and its internals

[ulrikstrid]

Not a blocker for OCaml, but I would be very happy if we could move over to Dune 3 more and remove useDune2.

[Gabriella439]

No blockers for Dhall

[RaitoBezarius]

Not a blocker for OCaml, but I would be very happy if we could move over to Dune 3 more and remove useDune2.

Don't hesitate to open an "epic issue" and attach it to this board: https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/projects/18 to track the progress of this cleanup.

[rnhmjoj]

It's not my area, but #208412 should be a blocker.

[etu]

As for PHP, the only thing we may consider a blocker is this (removal of PHP 8.0): #224505

However, it's not super critical. Removing PHP 8.0 would be nice because the support for it from upstream will give it's last patches at end of November and then after that's it's EOL. So the supported versions will also get that same patches at the end of that month. And by that time, we should be about ready with a new release anyways and when the next set of PHP patches comes out (end of December), NixOS 23.05 is EOL anyways.

[SomeoneSerge]

cuda: it doesn't seem like we have any blockers. We have been experiencing certain issues with libstdc++ after the gcc11->gcc12 update, and they certainly must be solved before the release, but I think we're almost done with them. I'll edit the task list in this post when we have updates

• cudaPackages.backendStdenv: mismatch with stdenv causes libstdc++ errors #220341 (should be resolved by cudaPackages: use the same libstdc++ as the rest of nixpkgs #223664)
• cudaPackages.cudatoolkit: use nix-built dependencies to avoid spurious failures #224646

[imincik]

Geospatial:

• QGIS needs update from 3.28.3 to 3.30.1 and QGIS LTS needs update from 3.22.16 to 3.28.5 (cc @lsix @sikmir @willcohen) . PR for QGIS-LTR - qgis-ltr: 3.22.16 -> 3.28.5 #224648 , PR for QGIS - qgis: 3.28.3 -> 3.30.1 #224805
• PDAL needs to be updated from 2.4.3 to 2.5.2 (cc @nh2 ) . There are open PRs for that - pdal: 2.4.3 -> 2.5.0 #210588 and pdal: 2.4.3 -> 2.5.4 #215960

[SomeoneSerge]

Tensorflow, which is a dependency for so many things, is being marked insecure and needs to be updated lest hydra stop building it. This is a blocker because users can't afford to just build tensorflow locally.

Unfortunately, tensorflow is too big and complex to be handled by the automatic python updates offered by the Python maintainers (such automatic updates tend to result in a cascade of breakages), and it's not quite in scope of CUDA maintainers either.

In other words, it would seem that we lack a team that could take responsibility of the machine learning and scientific computing infrastructure, and own tensorflow (opencv4, pytorch, jax, ...) in particular

• Update request: python310Packages.tensorflow 2.10.1 → 2.12.0 #224353
  • EDIT of 2023-04-21: python3Packages.tensorflow: 2.11.0 -> 2.11.1 #224846 Has been merged and backported, addressing the CVEs. Many thanks to @risicle!

Kudos to @mweinelt for bringing this up on matrix

EDIT of 2023-04-21: Tensorflow is being built and cached by hydra, altough I'm still some new errors on Darwin

[sternenseemann]

Haskell: NixOS/cabal2nix#597 (and follow up support for CABAL_DIR) should be merged, released and propagate to nixpkgs. Can be backported in a pinch though.

• haskell.packages.ghc96.haskell-language-server should work on release. I believe this is already done on haskell-updates.
• As I understand it, there is some mess regarding cachix 1.4 at the moment. @roberth and @domenkozar seem to be working on it already. If a solution doesn't present itself, it may be prudent to downgrade to cachix 1.3 to begin with. Since cachix falls under the online service exception, breaking changes can later be backported.
• We should make interaction with stack's official bindists work more smoothly. @cdepillabout will look into it.
• Get ghcWithPackages: fix dylib path issues of the boot libraries for GHC 9.6. #224542 or an equivalent change merged.

Things I want to advertise for is mainly someone looking into #208812, since I myself am unlikely to. Would be a shame if a fix doesn't present itself, as it'd be a regression from 22.11.

[mweinelt]

Our Ampere Altra boxes don't boot with the 6.1 LTS kernels. Was seen on the aarch64 community builder, but I expect this to also be an issue for our build farm.

NixOS/aarch64-build-box#152

cc @cole-h @grahamc @vcunat @Ma27 #215313

[garbas]

* [ ]  Marketing: @garbas @tomberek

Regarding the marketing stuff, where could we help out?

Here is our current plan:

• A banner on the front page of course.
• We will share the release (few times over the month after the release) with on social media accounts.
• We are resurrecting the newsletter and we'll put the 23.05 release into a spotlight there as well.
• Would love to held a release preparation meeting on live.nixos.org, if there is interest from the NixOS team of course. The idea is to bring some transparency to the process, invite users to ask questions, discuss some PRs, ... anything you want actually, NixOS team is in charge of the agenda.

What we would need is some help with to list what is new in 23.05. @RaitoBezarius and @mweinelt (and the rest of NixOS team) would you have time to jump on call to discuss this and if needed write it down together (maybe you already started writing the highlights)?

What we don't have the capacity to do so (yet) but would love to do if somebody :

• Produce some nice "What's new in NixOS 23.05?" video
• Contact the usual portals to feature us
• There are other ideas (Show how many have upgraded to 23.05, ...) but somebody always needs to do it. If you have some time to spread the NixOS please ping us in NixOS Marketing channel (#marketing:nixos.org) to coordinate and to help you out.

Any suggestion is more than welcome.

[m1cr0man]

No blockers for ACME 🙂

[ElvishJerricco]

I think this would be a good time to un-hide the boot.initrd.systemd options from the manual. For one, apparently we haven't been all that good about hiding them so a lot of them are visible anyway. But I also think we've reached the point that it's very nearly feature complete and a lot of people are using it on their systems. It would be good to have it in the documentation for this release so we can potentially start thinking about making it default in the next year or so.

[RaitoBezarius]

On "installer/rescue/ISO" side: #224830 is a serious problem. We should probably have a Nix team in nixpkgs.

cc @fricklerhandwerk @edolstra @roberth @tomberek @Ericson2314

[Flakebi]

No blockers for ROCm

[ryantm]

I'm not aware of blockers for documentation. @pennae has been doing a lot of work on manual rendering and might have something to say about the state of that.

[pennae]

I'm not aware of blockers for documentation. @pennae has been doing a lot of work on manual rendering and might have something to say about the state of that.

as far as we can tell manual rendering is in a stable state for both values of documentation.nixos.options.allowDocBook. #220116 would be nice to have but is in no way critical for the release.

[bcdarwin]

No blockers for R that I'm aware of

@jbedo

[ulrikstrid]

#224569 should probably be a blocker since it breaks scanning currently.

[Et7f3]

In other words, it would seem that we lack a team that could take responsibility of the machine learning and scientific computing infrastructure, and own tensorflow (opencv4, pytorch, jax, ...) in particular

PyTorch seems broken on Darwin #225441 maybe this failure is only for intel.

[teto]

We are working to get neovim 0.9 in the release #225152, should be fine.
I would also like to enable structuredAttrs in the lua ecosystem to ease future backports #224553

[wineee]

DDE

Work on adapting Deepin Desktop Environment is still in progress，there are currently 3 necessary PRs remaining to be processed：

• deepin.startdde: init at 5.10.1 #225400
• deepin.dde-file-manager: init at 6.0.13 #225534
• {deepin/dde}-kwin: init #215075
• [TODO] A nixos modules of dde, basically from this

The DDE component version is consistent with deepin v20 currently，but there are two exceptions：

1. File Manager:
   dde-file-manager requires really heavy patching (like this), and the v23 version seems to work fine on v20 base

2. Window Manager:
   deepin-kwin in v20 is just to old, can‘t compile at all. But embarrassingly, we don't have a tag that can be used normally. In 5.25.0, upstream removed deepin-wm-dbus，which moved to dde-appearance(One of dde-daemon's successors on v23).

Porting DDE v23 is still need months away，It's not stable even on deepin.

04/25 upd:

• nixos modules for dde, nixos/deepin: init #227936

[flokli]

#226192 should probably get merged, so people can't invoke hostnamectl/timedatectl manually (regression introduced with #216826).

[ElvishJerricco]

I think this would be a good time to un-hide the boot.initrd.systemd options from the manual. For one, apparently we haven't been all that good about hiding them so a lot of them are visible anyway. But I also think we've reached the point that it's very nearly feature complete and a lot of people are using it on their systems. It would be good to have it in the documentation for this release so we can potentially start thinking about making it default in the next year or so.

#226237

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/2023-04-10-nix-team-meeting-minutes-47/27357/1

[ttuegel]

Qt / KDE: A little late to the party, but thankfully no blockers.

[RaitoBezarius]

#227431 is a blocker, I advise to try https://github.com/medhefgo/systemd/commit/3ed1d966f00b002ed822ca9de116252bd91fe6c3 and for people who have too much time in life, to patch OVMF to cripple their EFI read API, reproduce the bug and test the fix properly with a NixOS test.

[srhb]

The upgrade of Nix to 2.12 has a breaking (unintentional?) change to the language regarding JSON serialization of floats. I don't know whether or not it's a dealbreaker for NixOS 23.05, but I wanted to highlight it regardless.

NixOS/nix#8259

[kira-bruneau]

I have a PR that has a breaking change in an a package, but not a NixOS module: #229321

Should we wait until the next release to get this update in?

[vcunat]

Yes. (unless it's some sufficiently important update) The current schedule item says

Restrict all breaking changes with the exception of desktop environments

[euank]

We've had discussion about handling k3s and version support over in #224483.

The outcome of that is, I believe, that we don't want to include k3s versions in a release which will go out of support while that release is active.

I've opened a PR to drop those versions over here: #233625

I'm not 100% if this issue is the correct place to highlight it since this issue seems like it could be "blockers for cutting the initial release branch", while this one is closer to a "blocker for cutting the final release". This is our first time for this one, so please let me know if there's a more appropriate place for this.

[RaitoBezarius]

NixOS 23.05 has been released: https://discourse.nixos.org/t/nixos-23-05-released/28649 ! Thank you to everyone who answered here and helped us to drive this process. See you at the next release!

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/darwin-again/29331/27

[nixos-discourse]

This issue has been mentioned on NixOS Discourse. There might be relevant details there:

https://discourse.nixos.org/t/lix-an-independent-variant-of-the-nix-package-manager/44975/32