Paper Nix ASafe And Policy Free System For Software Deployment

Existing systems for software deployment are neither safe nor sufficiently flexible. Primary safety issues are the inability to enforce reliable component dependency specification, and a lack of support for multiple versions or variants of a component. This renders deployment operations such as upgrading or deleting components dangerous and unpredictable. A deployment system must also be flexible (i.e., policy-free) enough to support both centralised and local package management, and to allow a variety of mechanisms for transferring components. In this paper we present Nix, a deployment system that addresses these issues through a simple technique of using cryptographic hashes to compute unique paths for component instances.

BibTeX Entry

@inproceedings{dvj2004b,
  author    = {E. Dolstra and M. de Jonge and E. Visser},
  title     = {Nix: A Safe and Policy-Free System for Software Deployment},
  booktitle = "Proceedings of the 14th Systems Administration
               Conference (LISA 2004)",
  publisher = "USENIX Association",
  editor    = "Lee Damon",
  year      = "2004",
  month     = nov,
  page      = "79--92",
  url       = base_url # "PaperNixASafeAndPolicyFreeSystemForSoftwareDeployment"
}

-- MerijnDeJonge - 28 Jun 2004