2.2 KiB
News
Home Manager includes a system for presenting news to the user. When making a change you, therefore, have the option to also include an associated news entry. In general, a news entry should only be added for truly noteworthy news. For example, a bug fix or new option does generally not need a news entry.
If you do have a change worthy of a news entry then please add one in
news.nix
but you should follow some basic guidelines:
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The entry timestamp should be in ISO-8601 format having "+00:00" as time zone. For example, "2017-09-13T17:10:14+00:00". A suitable timestamp can be produced by the command
$ date --iso-8601=second --universal -
The entry condition should be as specific as possible. For example, if you are changing or deprecating a specific option then you could restrict the news to those users who actually use this option.
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Wrap the news message so that it will fit in the typical terminal, that is, at most 80 characters wide. Ideally a bit less.
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Unlike commit messages, news will be read without any connection to the Home Manager source code. It is therefore important to make the message understandable in isolation and to those who do not have knowledge of the Home Manager internals. To this end it should be written in more descriptive, prose like way.
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If you refer to an option then write its full attribute path. That is, instead of writing
The option 'foo' has been deprecated, please use 'bar' instead.it should read
The option 'services.myservice.foo' has been deprecated, please use 'services.myservice.bar' instead. -
A new module, say
foo.nix, should always include a news entry that has a message along the lines ofA new module is available: 'services.foo'.If the module is platform specific, e.g., a service module using systemd, then a condition like
condition = hostPlatform.isLinux;should be added. If you contribute a module then you don't need to add this entry, the merger will create an entry for you.