Differences between Triton and NixOS

Notice: for those still linking to this doc, this has not been updated since June, 2016 and was outdated then.

This is probably missing a lot

Changes incorporated in Triton

• absolute-pkgconfig hook

  • pkg-conf is now part of stdenv
  • patches pkgs-config files to use explicit paths file/lib references, which elimates the needs for propagating pkg-config dependencies. (propagatation very bad and impure)

• absolute-libtool hook

  • same as absolute-pkgconfig, this hook uses explicit paths in libtool files

• parallel building enabled by default, and enableParallelBuilding is replaced by.

  • parallelBuild
  • parallelInstall
  • parallelCheck

• Remove stdenv.system and other broken platform specific functions. These functions only respected the host system, and were not cross compilation aware. stdenv.system is now stdenv.hostSystem & stdenv,targetSystem.

  • Usage

    • lib.elem stdenv.targetSystem lib.platforms.

  • Deprecated

    • isLinux
    • isFreeBSD
    • is64bit
    • isi686
    • etc…
• Refactored lib.platforms to be more robust and feature complete.
• Specific platfrom tuples are now used in meta.platforms for most packages and they are no referenced by attr instead of strings (for tuples).
• Removed insecure webkit/blink version (webkitgtk-2.4, qt4, qt5(disabled by default))

• Added cmake’s ninja generator support in cmake hooks

  • Used if ninja is a buildInput.

• Mesa

  • use platform tuple for driver directory instead of platform word size
  • mesa.driverLink -> mesa.driverSearchPath
  • mesaSupported -> mesa_noglu.meta.platforms

• OpenGL

  • convert builds using mesa as a compile-time dependency to opengl-dummy

    • opengl-dummy is currently a minimal build of mesa, but in the future could be converted to dummy libraries just to satisfy compile-time dependencies. This avoids a dependency on llvm and other mesa specific deps at build-time when using non-mesa opengl implementations (e.g. nvidia-drivers). opengl-dummy provides opengl-dummy.{egl{,-streams},gbm,glesv{1,2},glx} interfaces for making OpenGL features globally configurable at build-time.

• Python

  • all modules are built by default (minus tcl/tk)
  • fix pythonPackage’s callPackage scope
• Move vendored patches in the triton repo to triton-patches
• Migrate packages away from a category based heirarchy to subdividing based of the first few characters.
• gtk3 and qt5 are now the default where supported.

• gtk2 & qt4 are deprecated

  • non-essential packages and packages supporting newer toolkits are not allowed to use gtk2. Both projects are un-maintained by their respective upstreams.

• Remove unnecessary nested attrs

  • gnome3
  • qt5
• Remove Xorg aliases, xorg packages are accessible via xorg.

• Fetchurl (and company)

  • added support for ipfs multihashs
  • added support for sha512
  • removed support for md5 & sha1

  • add support for hashs & hash files provided by upstream sources, used for verifing hashes.

    • md5Confirm/md5Url (only for verification)
    • sha1Confirm/sha1Url (only for verification)
    • sha256Confirm/sha256Url
    • sha512Confirm/sha512Url
  • Added support for signatures used to sign sources and hash files.
  • failEarly

• Compiler hardening & optimization by default

  • Flags

    • optFlags
    • pie
    • fpic
    • noStrictOverflow
    • fortifySource
    • stackProtector
    • optimize

• Raised minimum supported platforms for all architectures

  • x86 = Westmere
  • Arm = v7 w/ floating point
  • Power = 8

• Compiler toolchain

  • rewrite in progress
  • gcc6 by default, previously gcc5 by default

• Consistent coding style

  • needs documentation, but it’s there

• Disable recursion in all-packages.nix

  • This means you can’t use gtk = gtk_3, these types of alliases do NOT pass overrides through aliases causing adverse affects.

• Go Lang

  • package auto updater
  • unvendors vendored dependencies for reuse

• enable /tmp cleanup by default

• Misc Changes

  • gnome, disable all applications by default
  • gdk-pixbuf is now a meta loader package containing gdk-pixbuf-core & librsvg. Previously the loaders were combined in the librsvg package and then librsvg was used by the gdk-pixbuf hook to set the module path.
  • glib add hook to add gio modules to GIO_EXTRA_MODULES path
  • removed unversioned gtk{mm} attr
  • refactored gstreamer 0 & 1, all new attr names

  • refactored nvidia-drivers, long-lived is the default

    • added tests
  • chromium - fetch tarball hash instead of downloading tarball in updater
  • gnome, gtk, cairo - full wayland support
  • x265 multi lib
  • libbluray, enable java by default (required for most all modern blurays)
  • new consistent coding style, needs coding style guide

  • disable all non-required services by default.

    • dhcp
    • ntpd
    • dns
    • ???
  • dbus: remove multiple outputs
  • xorg: disable xterm terminal emulator
  • remove garbage ati build (needs rewrite)
  • enable /tmp cleanup by default
  • disable audit in the kernel by default
  • merge ffmpeg builds (regular & full) & remove pre 2.x versions