This Week in NixOS, Week 34 2025

@pyrox0 opened a pull request to bootstrap Go from source. I'm not familiar with how many compilers are bootstrapped from source in nixpkgs, but the more the merrier.

In my How NixOS is built post, one of the things I raised concerns about is Hydra often calling external programs using the shell. @Mic92 opened a pull request in the Hydra codebase that fixes this! This happened three weeks ago, but I only now found out about it.

This week I learned the hard way that the Nix database, this is the SQLite database usually located at /nix/var/nix/db/db.sqlite, is not vacuumed automatically anymore. Vacuum compacts the database, reclaiming space on the disk, so it's an operation that needs to be performed periodically.

Not vacuuming the database automatically came as a surprise to me. I believe it won't be a problem for most usecases of NixOS, but under certain circumstances it can become a headache. This will mostly be a problem for hosts that are used as Nix build hosts, as these create a lot of entries in the database.

@trofi already provided a workaround for this in the original report, so I opened a pull request in nixpkgs based on that workaround. The more I use NixOS, the more I run into these small papercuts. The good thing is that it's both easy to research why things are the way they are and open pull requests to fix things.

Michael Stapelberg wrote a thorough post on managing secrets on NixOS using sops-nix.

The election committee that will administer the next Steering Committee election has been decided.

The next version of NixOS is 25.11 and November is fast approaching, as such, the call for release managers and editors is live. On a similar note, the retrospective for 25.05 is out!

The Nix team had write access to Nixpkgs in the past, but this has now been reverted. With the removal of CODEOWNERS this access wasn't needed anymore and it was a deviation from the rules around getting write access to nixpkgs.