I am figsoda, the primary release manager for NixOS 23.11 (“Tapir”).
Firstly, I want to thank the community for giving me this opportunity. And special thanks to @RaitoBezarius, the secondary and more experienced release manager for this release, who will be helping me in releasing NixOS 23.11, along with @alejandrosame and @riotbib, who will be the release editors for this release.
Let’s have a great 23.11 release cycle!
The release schedule is available as a GitHub issue for editability. Please feel free to make any suggestions, whether they are improvements, concerns, ideas, or just comments.
If you would like to reach out to any of the release managers or release editors, or if you are interested in participating in this release, we have a release management matrix room. We would love to hear any feedback or suggestions from you!
Breaking changes to Release Critical Packages are now restricted. That means the following packages should not receive any more breaking changes:
binutils
gcc
glibc
llvm
systemd
Note that some breaking changes are still in the staging branch, so the master branch will still receive these changes once they are merged in, but other new breaking changes should be held off until branch-off.
Branch-off has been postponed since the current procedure doesn’t work with the recently added branch protection rules. We will try again tomorrow if we manage to get in contact with one of the repository admins.
I hope I may ask a simple orientation question here:
I see the list of changes attached to the release, that is nice, however as soon as i started to try to migrate my system flake to new release branch - i’ve encountered some problems, thankfully all came with a explanation warnings, such as “fonts.fonts->fonts.packages” change and syncthing attributes being moved around and some removed.
I would love to be able to read about such changes beforehand, if it’s possible, however I was not able to locate them in release notes.
Am I not looking in the right place?
but syncthing change i still cannot find there. It seems not just some options were moved, some removed - also some options are promoted into config directly by name (a trace warning implies that), but that is something i’d love to read in release changes.
Yeah, I know what you mean. And the sheer number of changes is quite overwhelming. But I have no idea how to improve things, since any of the listed changes is potentially relevant for someone’s particular configuration.
Not sure if you had the same issue, but I searched for “syncthing” and found this post. So writing here in case it helps anyone else.
I am also puzzled after seeing failed syncthing service after 23.11 upgrade.
syncthing[25754]: [start] 2023/12/04 21:45:11 WARNING: Error opening database: mkdir /var/lib/syncthing: permission denied (is another instance of Syncthing running?)
While trying to fix, the description of services.syncthing.dataDir didn’t make sense:
The path where synchronised directories will exist.
With its default value of default /var/lib/syncthing and example given as /home/yourUser
I tried changing this to my home directory, and I had syncthing working again, but its internal DB placed on my home directory! Luckily wiki still has the more understandable example:
...
dataDir = "/home/myusername/.config/syncthing/db"; # Folder for Syncthing's database
...
So changing it to somewhere writable by my user (~/.local/share/syncthing) fixed it for me.
I’ve just noticed that! indeed, as of 23.11 switch the dataDir was shamelessly repurposed! by sheer luck it did not break anything for me, but it did recreate the whole database in a new location
Luckily 