[Feature Request] Way to inform channel users of e.g. outdated channel / Notify users of new NixOS Version

Development
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Hi!
Some months ago I noticed that I have an ancient nix-channel in use on my devices.

It would have been great if there was a way for a channel maintainer to mark a channel (e.g. nixos 25.05) as e.g. unmaintained so it prints a red warning every time the channel is fetched (e.g. on nixos-rebuild --upgrade). Maybe allow for custom messages with a settable color (green/orange/red/blue)? Or another way to notify a nixos user that a new version is here and they should update.

Best,
Thomas

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We don’t have a good warning story yet. Lix has been making improvements on that front. There’s a bunch of details to consider. If you want to explore this, go ahead and tell us what you find :person_shrugging:

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Thanks! I just wanted to start the discussion. Personally I think I am still too far away from nix-details to be able to contribute code or architecture thoughts. (As I until a few months ago didn’t know that old nixos-channels become unmaintained. I thought it is the same as with system.stateVersion which doesn’t need to be changed to stay up to date.)

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One thing we should do in NixOS is populate the SUPPORT_END= field in /etc/os-release whoops we already do, because systemd can show warnings during bootup about running an OS that’s out of its support window (and I’d like for DEs like GNOME and KDE to do the same on the desktop).

6 Likes
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We already do that as part of our release processes where we add that field to the os-release file during our branch-of.

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Great to hear that. Somehow I missed that message - maybe due to plymouth (misconfiguration) or I had a too-old version back then? Agree that it would be great to show that in GUI (requires some patches on others projects). And a way to show that on servers would also be great - no idea what would be best here.

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If my quick glance at the commit linked by @jopejoe1 is correct, 25.11. is the first release to include that field. So the warning mentioned won’t be displayed anywhere before July this year (when 25.11. is EOL’ed)

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We already do this since 22.11, but we create a new commit for each branch of.

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Dunno how I was mistaken about this; I really thought we didn’t do this at all. Sorry about that, and very nice!