Welcome back to nixpkgs.news! As many have noticed, the Nix community has been in a difficult position for some time. As tensions have risen and contributors have left we have seen the beginning of a new chapter for Nix. Projects like Lix and Aux seek to provide a space more conducive to collaboration and technical excellence. As a part of this transition, nixpkgs.news will not be issuing new releases. Instead, after initial work, news related to Lix and Aux will be the primary focus of this outlet. It is a difficult decision to make as I’ve come to hear from many who find these weekly recaps useful, but the current climate of the Nix ecosystem is not something that I am comfortable promoting. To stay up to date throughout this process, you can find myself on Mastodon and Patreon where I still intend to release regular content involving my Nix escapades and other learnings.

@emily has provided a security advisory for OpenSSH CVE-2024-6387 “regreSSHion”. This is a particularly nasty vulnerability which should be patched immediately. Fixes are available for 23.11, 24.05, and unstable. If you have not already, please consider this an urgent call to update your systems.

@nicknovitski announced make-shell, a modular replacement for Nixpkgs’ mkShell helper. Rather than operating as a wrapper around mkDerivation like mkShell does, this project allows you to make use of the NixOS module system to construct more elaborate shell environments. To give the project a try, see its instructions on GitHub.

@diamondburned has released nix-search, a fast replacement for nix search. The project works by first constructing a package index which takes approximately 20 seconds. After that, packages can be queried nearly instantly. To get started, see the announcement for installation instructions or refer to the project on GitHub.

@Infinisil posted a new update from the Nix Constitutional Assembly about a new interim Nixpkgs committer delegation team. In recent weeks the ability for Nixpkgs contributors to gain commit rights to the repository ground to a halt. To resolve this an interim team comprised of veteran Nixpkgs contributors has been established to manage the responsibility. This team is comprised of @Mic92, @NickCao, and @jtojnar.

@lassulus provided a status report for the constitutional assembly. This post goes into detail describing the work that has been done over the last 7 weeks that the assembly has existed and what work remains to be done. There is still a significant amount of work to be done by the assembly, but it does appear to be making reasonable progress. If you would like to provide feedback for the assembly, you can now do so through official feedback channels.

New packages added this week:

New modules added this week: