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f5dafbfa83
For the time being, we're moving towards https://nix.dev/ containing all tutorials and guides. The Nixpkgs manual is reinforced to be a _reference_ manual. While it's not just reference for now, that's what the docs team is working towards. This commits rewrites the Nixpkgs manual introduction to reflect that and point to some more useful links. The contribution docs are updated similarly so it's not missed. Co-authored-by: Valentin Gagarin <valentin.gagarin@tweag.io> Co-authored-by: Robert Hensing <roberth@users.noreply.github.com>
50 lines
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Markdown
50 lines
3 KiB
Markdown
# Preface {#preface}
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The Nix Packages collection (Nixpkgs) is a set of thousands of packages for the
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[Nix package manager](https://nixos.org/nix/), released under a
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[permissive MIT license](https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/COPYING).
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Packages are available for several platforms, and can be used with the Nix
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package manager on most GNU/Linux distributions as well as [NixOS](https://nixos.org/nixos).
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This document is the user [_reference_](https://nix.dev/contributing/documentation/diataxis#reference) manual for Nixpkgs.
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It describes entire public interface of Nixpkgs in a concise and orderly manner, and all relevant behaviors, with examples and cross-references.
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To discover other kinds of documentation:
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- [nix.dev](https://nix.dev/): Tutorials and guides for getting things done with Nix
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- [NixOS **Option Search**](https://search.nixos.org/options) and reference documentation
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- [Nixpkgs **Package Search**](https://search.nixos.org/packages)
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- [**NixOS** manual](https://nixos.org/manual/nixos/stable/): Reference documentation for the NixOS Linux distribution
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- [`CONTRIBUTING.md`](https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/blob/master/CONTRIBUTING.md): Contributing to Nixpkgs, including this manual
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## Overview of Nixpkgs {#overview-of-nixpkgs}
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Nix expressions describe how to build packages from source and are collected in
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the [nixpkgs repository](https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs). Also included in the
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collection are Nix expressions for
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[NixOS modules](https://nixos.org/nixos/manual/index.html#sec-writing-modules).
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With these expressions the Nix package manager can build binary packages.
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Packages, including the Nix packages collection, are distributed through
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[channels](https://nixos.org/nix/manual/#sec-channels). The collection is
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distributed for users of Nix on non-NixOS distributions through the channel
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`nixpkgs`. Users of NixOS generally use one of the `nixos-*` channels, e.g.
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`nixos-22.11`, which includes all packages and modules for the stable NixOS
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22.11. Stable NixOS releases are generally only given
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security updates. More up to date packages and modules are available via the
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`nixos-unstable` channel.
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Both `nixos-unstable` and `nixpkgs` follow the `master` branch of the Nixpkgs
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repository, although both do lag the `master` branch by generally
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[a couple of days](https://status.nixos.org/). Updates to a channel are
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distributed as soon as all tests for that channel pass, e.g.
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[this table](https://hydra.nixos.org/job/nixpkgs/trunk/unstable#tabs-constituents)
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shows the status of tests for the `nixpkgs` channel.
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The tests are conducted by a cluster called [Hydra](https://nixos.org/hydra/),
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which also builds binary packages from the Nix expressions in Nixpkgs for
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`x86_64-linux`, `i686-linux` and `x86_64-darwin`.
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The binaries are made available via a [binary cache](https://cache.nixos.org).
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The current Nix expressions of the channels are available in the
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[`nixpkgs`](https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs) repository in branches
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that correspond to the channel names (e.g. `nixos-22.11-small`).
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