New services section of release notes

I noticed that the New services section of the release notes is almost empty for the last few releases. Looking back I’m guilty of not adding new services to that section. I would suggest we either start enforcing a rule of new services need to be added to that section, or maybe just drop the section.

If we’re going to keep the section can we go back over the last 3 months and ping people who have written new services to add an entry to the section?

Anyone have any thoughts on the topic?

Yes yes yes please :rofl:
New NixOS services are notable additions, we need to try to get release notes for each of them.
They don’t even have to be immense. I believe when @samueldr RM’d it was just a list of files added. Though there could be some exceptions like:

  1. Service exists that’s required to be used for a package that already exists in nixpkgs.
    In nixpkgs this situation happened: High CPU utilization in Blueman 2.1.1 and no tray-icon · Issue #71421 · NixOS/nixpkgs · GitHub
    Migration was compulsory.

  2. New module is a part of an older setup.
    See services.system-config-printer.enable NixOS 23.11 manual | Nix & NixOS. Kinda similar to #1

  3. …probably more I can’t think of right now.

Release notes should be any info that could be useful when migrating to a new version of NixOS.
We actually have a checklist on Ensured that relevant documentation is up to date so maybe there should be one on release notes. It should be done in the same PR, who’s going to write a note months after they contributed something?

I often feel so much happens in nixpkgs that presentation falls out the window.
NixOS users must be very perceptive, great stuff lands and it can be hard to notice.
It doesn’t help you can never audit your updates properly in NixOS. When a user of a traditional package-manager performs a transaction in place they are typically presented some sort of changelog of what this transaction is. I wish we had something to the same result for nixos-rebuild.

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That’s true and I’m guilty of that myself.
Maybe one way to reduce the “lost options” is that we compare the https://nixos.org/nixos/options.json.gz for every release and provide a diff?
Any change should have a small notice attached to it, be it “new/dropped service XYZ” or “now supports optional automatic reboots on kernel updates”.

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