Announcement: Moving nixos.org to Netlify

There is a PR open to add Nix support to Netlify, but it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere: Make nix available in the container by wereHamster · Pull Request #187 · netlify/build-image · GitHub

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I wasn’t aware of status.nixos.org.
Only knew howoldis and was searching hard how to find that information for now → until I found this threat now.

I think status.nixos.org should get somewhere mentioned on nixos.org

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NixOps is no longer in the main menu?
image

Yes, we got rid of the NixOps and Hydra pages because they didn’t add much info over their GitHub project pages. So they now redirect to the latter.

And also Disnix was removed.

We will add a page - in next weeks - where we will list all of related tools / projects which complement nix/nixpkgs/nixos.

It seems as if the download of the virtual box appliances is broken as well.

@NobbZ Thanks for the report. I’ve fixed the VirtualBox links.

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I saw that there were some GNOME images and tried to download one, but it seems that they’re all 404? I’m guessing that this is not right and needs fixing. For example: https://channels.nixos.org/nixos-19.09/latest-nixos-gnome-x86_64-linux.iso gives https://releases.nixos.org/nixos/19.09/nixos-19.09.2284.bf7c0f0461e/nixos-gnome-19.09.2284.bf7c0f0461e-x86_64-linux.iso which does not exist

Edit: Seems that various other configurations are listed but nonexistent as well

Those links in channels.nixos org are there to prepare for a change that is coming with 20.03. those links are not yet used anywhere on the website.

repology.org did not get an update for nixpkgs in the last 19 days. That may also be related to the website change: https://repology.org/log/740905

3 Likes

Thanks. That’s good to know.

I maintain the Nix-related bits of a mirror so I actually use the list of files. I’ll just ignore the nonexistent files.

We will fix this shortly thank you for reporting.

@samueldr how close are you with generating packages.json and options.json in mirror-nixos-branch.pl?

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Most of our projects use a shell.nix file that looks something like this:

let
  pkgs = import (fetchTarball http://nixos.org/channels/nixpkgs-19.09-darwin/nixexprs.tar.xz) {};
in pkgs.mkShell {
  buildInputs = [
    pkgs.nodejs
  ];
}

This is broken at the moment when we try to enter a nix-shell:

unpacking 'http://nixos.org/channels/nixpkgs-19.09-darwin/nixexprs.tar.xz'...
tar: Unrecognized archive format
tar: Error exit delayed from previous errors.
error: program 'tar' failed with exit code 1

I assume this is because the tarballs have moved, which is why I post this here.

The error persists if I change the URL to what I think is the correct new one: https://channels.nixos.org/nixpkgs-19.09-darwin/nixexprs.tar.xz.

I thought that this might be because fetchTarball doesn’t follow redirects, so I tried to find the direct URL to a release (which is not what I would want in the end, as I would want to use a channel). When I navigated from releases.nixos.org through to the release I want, I got this URL, which was broken: https://releases.nixos.org/releases.nixos.org/nixpkgs/19.09-darwin/nixpkgs-darwin-19.09pre194984.6f11edab638. As you can see there are two releases.nixos.org in there.

I then fixed the URL by hand and tried to start nix-shell with this URL: https://releases.nixos.org/nixpkgs/19.09-darwin/nixpkgs-darwin-19.09pre194984.6f11edab638/nixexprs.tar.xz. This also failed. (Unrecognized archive format).

I then randomly tried the latest release https://releases.nixos.org/nixpkgs/nixpkgs-20.09pre217526.9b3515eb95d/nixexprs.tar.xz and that worked, but I’m not sure why, as it is not Darwin related or anything.

It seems to me that this is a mixture of problems and some of them might likely be in the way I try to do things. If you can point me to how to migrate what we had before to what it should be that would be greatly appreciated!

I’m not involved in Nix’s infrastructure so this is all non-official information, but I think the short answer is that you shouldn’t have needed to change anything.

I just tried the exact URL you have: http://nixos.org/channels/nixpkgs-19.09-darwin/nixexprs.tar.xz and got the correct tarball, so maybe this was an intermittent error, or a configuration error that was quickly fixed.

If you keep getting this I would suggest doing curl -IL http://nixos.org/channels/nixpkgs-19.09-darwin/nixexprs.tar.xz and checking if you got the right redirects.

1 Like

Thanks, @dramforever, it does indeed work with the old URL again! That’s good to know, sorry for the confusion.

I can explain what happened here. You must have found one of the few, maybe only release that exhibits an issue I theorized would happen with a fix we were doing. The good news is that confirms my assumption at that time.

This change added a new output to the tarball job. This adds the packages.json.br build product here. Compare with the previous build. The channel mirroring script would download whatever was the “first” build product in the json query to the build. This was fixed.

The “first” build product is not the first one listed on the HTML page. What ended up being mirrored for a short interval was the packages.json list compressed as brotli, rather than the nix expressions! I believe there was a windows of about 48 hours where releases could have had the wrong product mirrored.

So, in a nutshell, there was an issue, it got fixed. There is no action required on your part.

5 Likes

This is pretty much my motto in life.

Hi,

The nix-dev Archives “could not be found.”
The old mailing list archive is unreacheable.

These are very important and should be restored. There’s years worth of
Nix history and expertise in there.

In the meantime if anybody wants I copy I can provide one if you email
me (hi@alyssa.is)

2 Likes

It is on a todo list to fix this. Right now I’m trying to get a hold on the archive.

@qyliss do you have an archive of this mailing list?

It is on a todo list to fix this. Right now I’m trying to get a hold
on the archive.

@qyliss do you have an archive of this mailing list?

I have an archive I scraped from The nix-dev Archives a few months
ago. It does not include things like attachments, which I think might
have also been hosted on the website, but I’m not sure about that.

I’m a bit concerned at the implication there’s no backup of the old
website??