NixOS 18.03 released

[Vladimír Čunát]

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

[Matthias Beyer]

Hi Vladimir, Hi community!

Thank you all for this amazing work. I just switched from unstable
over to 18.03 and it worked flawlessly so far.

--
Mit freundlichen Grüßen,
Kind regards,
Matthias Beyer

Consider switching to free software.
It adds value to your life.
https://www.gnu.org/

[periklis....@holidaycheck.com]

Many thanks to our maintainer team Vladimir and Franz. Great Work!

However, also many thanks to the contributing community. I would like to pick some star topics that finally made it:

- Thanks to Ericson1234 for his efforts in landing finally cross-compilation

- Thanks to all the people behind aarch64 and the new RISC-V support, which broadens our options on platforms and communities

- Thanks of course to our unstoppable grahamc for his mediation work resulting in the Nix Core Team.

- Thanks to Ryantm for his efforts to keep nixpkgs an up2date repository.

For sure i missed a lot, but just were some highlights i want to raise awareness. Thank you a lot!

[David Shepard]

Hello, Vladimir.

I am new to NixOS and am really trying to get this working by following the installation guide and have ran into a bug. Is there a way to install a completely stable version of NixOS, one that a new user like myself is likely to find that it "just works" as advertised? The experience so far with 18.03 has been very frustrating, as I ran into a bug that is a complete show-stopper for me on install of 18.03. If you're interested, here is what I'm seeing.

Thanks.
--David

[Michael Raskin]

><https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/-rENEy146dFM/WtEQP2jImaI/AAAAAAAAAGY/hNoBsrrHBVcVp85uFC_BwoKjbWfRqWiUACLcBGAs/s1600/Screen%2BShot%2B2018-04-13%2Bat%2B4.15.48%2BPM.png>

>
>I am new to NixOS and am really trying to get this working by following the

>installation guide and have ran into a bug. Is there a way to install a *completely
>stable* version of NixOS, one that a new user like myself is likely to find

>that it "just works" as advertised? The experience so far with 18.03 has
>been very frustrating, as I ran into a bug that is a complete show-stopper
>for me on install of 18.03. If you're interested, here is what I'm seeing.

What is the latest complete backup you have? I think the error is
«disk write failure», which is very hard to work around with any kind of
consistency guarantees, and which also might mean that you have a short
window of time where copying most of the data from the drive might
succeed.

The screenshot says that there is an SQLite error preventing the build
from succeeding, and this failure is in turn caused by a disk write
failure.

[David Shepard]

This is a completely new install, I am a new user. Just trying to follow the manual. I built a virtual box instance and am trying to use btrfs. I tried ext4 and ran into other problems. Host is Mac OS High Sierra on a SSD, never had any hardware problems there. Couldn't find any known show-stopper problems with MySQL and btrfs online, so I'm running out of ideas. It feels like a filesystem or a driver issue, tbh.

--David

[John Ramsden]

You may have never been alerted of a hardware problem with your disk, but it doesn't mean you aren't having one. It sounds like you're running on a virtual disk image, possibly on top of HFS+. HFS+ isn't exactly known to be the most reliable file system. It's more than likely that your problem is something to do with the VM, or the host hardware, rather than NixOS itself.

--
John Ramsden

[David Shepard]

Roger that. I'll just run Ubuntu on my faulty hardware then..

--David

> --
> You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "nix-devel" group.
> To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an email to nix-devel+...@googlegroups.com.
> To post to this group, send email to nix-...@googlegroups.com.
> To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/nix-devel/1523657550.2637502.1337435032.4288BA0B%40webmail.messagingengine.com.
> For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout.

[David Shepard]

For completeness, I'm running APFS, not HFS+. That's probably a huge problem, too, am I right?

--David



> On Apr 13, 2018, at 18:12, John Ramsden <johnr...@riseup.net> wrote:
>

[Leo Gaspard]

Just thinking, as you run on a virtual disk image, are you sure you have
enough free disk space? I don't know how sqlite handles
out-of-disk-space conditions, but it may very well be with a “disk I/O
error.”

The second possibility I can think of is that the partitioning scheme
you performed when doing the beginning of chapter 2 is somehow wrong, so
could you paste your configuration.nix as well as the output of “mount”
in the VM?

The third and last possibility I can think of with the few clues you
gave us is that there is indeed an error of disk reliability somewhere
under NixOS, at virtualbox, filesystem, Mac OS or hardware level.

Also, I assume you already read [1), that in particular points to a
pre-installed virtualbox image?

(and if you could avoid being aggressive on the ML it'd be nice, none of
the people who read you have ever done anything wrong to you)


[1] https://nixos.org/nixos/manual/index.html#sec-instaling-virtualbox-guest

[David Shepard]

So, you're right, I shouldn't have been so flippant. I had spent the past two days trying to get this working and was frustrated. I've never had any problems with hardware on this box and being told that it was a hardware problem sorta triggered me. Installing Ubuntu turned out to be a very good troubleshooting step, as seeing that I had similar problems with the filesystem during Ubuntu install gave me the confidence I needed that I wasn't looking at a problem with the installer. I eventually narrowed the bug down to a problem with the VirtualBox NVME controller. I am surprised, but at the same time not surprised. It's been about five years since I found a significant bug in Virtualbox but it does happen. Back to using a SATA controller for the hard drive and the problem is solved. After isolating the flaw, NixOS install went off without a hitch! So, thanks. I can go back to learning this distro the normal way. My apologies to you, John Ramsden.

--David

[John Ramsden]

My apologies as well if I came off as insulting, it was not my intention. I just wished to state that the problem might not be NixOS itself.

--

  John Ramsden

To view this discussion on the web visit https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/nix-devel/9596454e-983b-4156-9764-520714b39c19%40googlegroups.com.

[Eelco Dolstra]

Hi,

On 04/13/2018 10:36 PM, 'Michael Raskin' via nix-devel wrote:

>> I am new to NixOS and am really trying to get this working by following the
>> installation guide and have ran into a bug. Is there a way to install a *completely
>> stable* version of NixOS, one that a new user like myself is likely to find
>> that it "just works" as advertised? The experience so far with 18.03 has
>> been very frustrating, as I ran into a bug that is a complete show-stopper
>> for me on install of 18.03. If you're interested, here is what I'm seeing.
>
> What is the latest complete backup you have? I think the error is
> «disk write failure»

SQLITE_IOERR does not necessarily denote a hardware problem. For example, SQLite
also sometimes returns that error when the disk is full. (It should return
SQLITE_FULL but it doesn't.)

--
Eelco Dolstra | Infor / LogicBlox | http://nixos.org/~eelco/