value` can be used to specify function arguments on the command
line.
- `nix-install-package --url
URL` allows a package to be installed directly from the given URL.
- Nix now works behind an HTTP proxy server; just set the standard
environment variables `http_proxy`, `https_proxy`, `ftp_proxy` or
`all_proxy` appropriately. Functions such as `fetchurl` in Nixpkgs
also respect these variables.
- `nix-build -o
symlink` allows the symlink to the build result to be named
something other than `result`.
- Platform support:
- Support for 64-bit platforms, provided a [suitably patched ATerm
library](http://bugzilla.sen.cwi.nl:8080/show_bug.cgi?id=606) is
used. Also, files larger than 2 GiB are now supported.
- Added support for Cygwin (Windows, `i686-cygwin`), Mac OS X on
Intel (`i686-darwin`) and Linux on PowerPC (`powerpc-linux`).
- Users of SMP and multicore machines will appreciate that the
number of builds to be performed in parallel can now be
specified in the configuration file in the `build-max-jobs`
setting.
- Garbage collector improvements:
- Open files (such as running programs) are now used as roots of
the garbage collector. This prevents programs that have been
uninstalled from being garbage collected while they are still
running. The script that detects these additional runtime roots
(`find-runtime-roots.pl`) is inherently system-specific, but it
should work on Linux and on all platforms that have the `lsof`
utility.
- `nix-store --gc` (a.k.a. `nix-collect-garbage`) prints out the
number of bytes freed on standard output. `nix-store
--gc --print-dead` shows how many bytes would be freed by an
actual garbage collection.
- `nix-collect-garbage -d` removes all old generations of *all*
profiles before calling the actual garbage collector (`nix-store