Dear community,

I'm really happy I can announce the 18.03 "Impala" stable release for
x86_64-linux and x86_64-darwin.  We got delayed a few days past the
promise - to keep the quality higher.  aarch64-linux was also promised
and it will be delayed even longer before a proper channel is provided.

In this release cycle I believe we've moved the project forward
significantly, with many large changes and ever increasing amounts of
commits (~17k), contributors (~750), merge requests...  Thank you all
for helping with that!

Please, see the release notes at least for 18.03 highlights:
https://nixos.org/nixos/manual/release-notes.html#sec-release-18.03

Upgrading and new downloads are the same as usual:
https://nixos.org/nixos/manual/index.html#sec-upgrading
https://nixos.org/nixos/download.html

Note that 17.09 is agreed to receive important fixes at least until the
end of April.  So far I haven't noticed any *volunteers* willing to team
up and promise some form of 17.09 maintenance beyond that.

I would like to remind especially those with nixpkgs push access of the
"Maintenance workflow" I wrote about recently:
https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/nix-devel/3KxPNwxDV9E

I know commit count isn't a good metric at all, but let me still
highlight a few most committing contributors since 17.09, as I believe
they *did* contribute significantly:
   1126 Jörg Thalheim (@Mic92)
   1045 Frederik Rietdijk (@FRidh)
    918 Orivej Desh (@orivej)
    696 @adisbladis

Cheers :-)
--Vladimir