As we pass the halfway mark of the month, the Zero Hydra Failures initiative for the new NixOS 24.05 release has picked up steam. This important step in the release cycle is focused on resolving package build failures that would otherwise prevent a release or require certain packages to be marked as broken. Interested contributors can look at the Nix Review Tools Reports site to discover failing builds that need fixing. Moving forward, release channels will be created on May 22nd to finalize them before the official release at the end of the month.

@ron released an update on the Constitutional Assembly Appointment. After nominations for the assembly closed last week, 7 members were selected to construct the new governance model for Nix. The chosen assembly members represent highly-skilled and involved members of the community and will require the next few weeks to work out the necessary changes to the Nix ecosystem. For more information about the specific assembly members, including their applications for the process, see the linked announcement.

@fricklerhandwerk posted a call for volunteers to curate official Nix projects. The Nix ecosystem has few official projects, limiting its scope to NixPkgs, NixOS, and Nix mainly. However, third-party Nix projects have become vital underpinnings of the technology’s use. With this in mind, the intent of the linked post is to begin curating a set of these projects which can be officially supported. This would be an important step to improving the maintenance story for many projects as well as increasing interoperability and consistency between Nix tools.

@dnr announced Styx, an alternate binary substitution mechanism. Styx breaks up files into chunks and allows substitutors to only download the new chunks that they don’t already have. The project is also capable of using differential compression on sequences of chunks, producing a read-only filesystem where files share chunks, fetching and caching chunks on-demand, and reducing the overall disk requirements for binary caches that would otherwise be storing Nix Archives (NARs).

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Security fixes this week:

New packages added this week:

New modules added this week: