When rebuilding you have to manually run `systemctl --user daemon-reload`. It gathers all authenticated users using `loginctl list-user` and runs `daemon-reload` for each of them. This is a first step towards a `nixos-rebuild` which is able to reload user units from systemd. The entire task is fairly hard, however I consider this patch usable as it allows to restart units without running `daemon-reload` for each authenticated user.
To build the manual, you need Nix installed on your system (no need
for NixOS). To install Nix, follow the instructions at
    https://nixos.org/nix/download.html
When you have Nix on your system, in the root directory of the project
(i.e., `nixpkgs`), run:
    nix-build nixos/release.nix -A manual.x86_64-linux
When this command successfully finishes, it will tell you where the
manual got generated.