This week was a tumultuous one for the Nix community. Concerns were raised for a second time about the sponsorship of branded Nix events by weapons manufacturers. Many contributors made their stance clear in an Open Letter. Additional discussion took place on the NixOS forums, but it became clear that the NixOS Foundation Board members and other named members from the Open Letter do not currently believe this sponsorship is an issue despite the explicit requests of community members to not have their work used to advertise weapons services. If you have not already, please consider adding your signature to the letter. Thank you to @samueldr for creating the Open Letter and thank you to all of the community members who have signed it so far.

Now, for the rest of the news…

@edolstra announced the release of Nix 2.21! This release includes improvements for error reporting within nix repl, adds support for --debugger sessions to access let bindings, and includes new options for the nix profile upgrade and nix profile remove commands. All changes in this release are available in the release notes.

@lucperkins shared that FlakeHub Cache is in private beta. FlakeHub Cache brings Flake-level caching to FlakeHub, all private and managed with JSON Web Tokens (JWTs) for authentication. Pushing to the cache is currently available in GitHub Actions and GitLab support is coming soon. Determinate Systems is currently looking for feedback and encourage folks to sign up for the beta and ask any questions in the company’s Discord.

@shivaraj-bh has announced services-flake, a new project to provide portable services that work on both Linux and macOS using Nix Flakes. This is an ambitious goal and could use all of the help the community can deliver. If you are interested in contributing, you can find the project on GitHub.

@aanderse announced the release of teraflops, a tool that @aanderse has used to replace NixOps. Teraflops combines colmena, terraform, and nixos-infect to enable system deployment and management using Nix Flakes. The project is available on GitHub.

@Freed-Wu published a port of vscode-ide-nix to Vim. This port provides Vim users with the same set of tools that VS Code users have been using to develop with Nix. For a full set of instructions on how to start using the plugin, see the GitHub Repository.

New packages added this week:

Fixes and updates this week: