# Tweag + Nix dev update #6

**URL:** https://discourse.nixos.org/t/tweag-nix-dev-update-6/11195
**Category:** Development
**Created:** [January 26, 2021, 9:17am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/tweag-nix-dev-update-6/11195 "2021-01-26T09:17:52Z")
**Posts on this page:** 1
**Showing post:** 1

<div class="post-metadata">

### Author: ![thufschmitt](https://discourse.nixos.org/user_avatar/discourse.nixos.org/thufschmitt/32/202_2.png) [@thufschmitt](https://discourse.nixos.org/u/thufschmitt)
#### Post date: [January 26, 2021, 9:17am UTC](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/tweag-nix-dev-update-6/11195/1 "2021-01-26T09:17:52Z")

</div>

A bit more than one month after [our last update](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/tweag-nix-dev-update-5/10560), here are some highlights of the work of the Tweag Nix team:

# Trustix

Adam has been quite busy on the Trustix front:

- Trustix now has its own webpage at [https://build-transparency.org/](https://build-transparency.org/). Also showing a demo of it in action:

- A lot of work has been put on the frontend. There’s not much to show yet, but it’s progressing

- The db format has been massaged to make it easier to consume in real-time and muuuuch faster

# Nix UX

@edolstra has put a significant effort into the new-style commands, to

- significantly extend the `nix help` command, making it display the full man-page when relevant ([#4336](https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/4336)). Manpages are now in markdown to make the content easily resuable elsewhere.
- reorganize them to make their usage more consistent ([d33eca](https://github.com/NixOS/nix/commit/d33eca8539d2e66759f7b52fa7b0db4a6a1ba673), [29007f](https://github.com/NixOS/nix/commit/29007f8bc6ea42ae1f8311f00c0b5e14f04ec9e5), …)
- Add several missing ones ([#4429](https://github.com/NixOS/nix/issues/4429))

The [CLI guidelines](https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/4302) that @garbas wrote have also been merged.

# Content-addressed derivations

An experimental branch of hydra now supports building content-addressed derivations. While this probably won’t make it to [hydra.nixos.org](http://hydra.nixos.org) for some time, it will be tremendously useful to test things at scale.

The Nix implementation also keeps going with some ongoing work to handle signatures of content-addressed derivations.

# [Nixos.org](http://Nixos.org) redesign

@garbas is still doing an herculean work on the website, namely:

- The CSS styling of [nixos.org](http://nixos.org) has been extracted into [its own repository](https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-common-styles) so that it’s reusable by other sites,
- All the infra around [status.nixos.org](http://status.nixos.org) has now been moved to netlify,
- [search.nixos.org](http://search.nixos.org) is being reworked to display more information and allow filtering the results ([#261](https://github.com/NixOS/nixos-search/pull/261)):  
 ![nix-search](https://discourse.nixos.org/uploads/default/original/2X/d/d6e3d8c9cf8acd7e3a906bf24fd8def0b2e71534.gif)

# Misc.

- @infinisil has been doing [some internal refactorings on the Nix evaluator](https://github.com/NixOS/nix/pull/4355) as a preparation for his work on lazy attribute names
- @infinisil opened and closed an [RFC](https://github.com/NixOS/rfcs/pull/84), leading to some discussions on the design and usage of fixed-output derivations
- Adam noticed some incorrect 301 redirects in [channels.nixos.org](http://channels.nixos.org) leading to people seeing outdated results because of browsers caches
- @edolstra removed the last bits preventing a statically-linked Nix to work, meaning that it’s now possible to fetch a statically-linked Nix and run `./nix --store ~/my-nix` without having to install anything.

# Nickel

Although Nickel is technically not a Nix project, it is heavily Nix-inspired and might be of interest to some. So a few words on the awesome work that @yannham is doing on it:

- There’s a new [query](https://github.com/tweag/nickel/issues/232) subcommand to retrieve the metadata associated to values from the command-line
- There’s ongoing work for adding a nice REPL ([here](https://github.com/tweag/nickel/pull/260), [here](https://github.com/tweag/nickel/pull/261), [here](https://github.com/tweag/nickel/pull/263) and [here](https://github.com/tweag/nickel/pull/264)). Most of this work should also be reusable as the backend for a coming LSP server
- The project is also getting a new [CI setup](https://github.com/tweag/nickel/pull/262) (thanks to @garbas) to test it against several versions of the rust compiler and make IDE tooling usable in nix-shell or lorri.

---

_[View the full topic](https://discourse.nixos.org/t/tweag-nix-dev-update-6/11195)._