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Nix ASafe And Policy-FreeSystemForSoftwareDeployment

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ComputingScienceColloquium

Date: November 12

Time: %RED% 15:00%ENDCOLOR%

Room: %RED%CGN room B020%ENDCOLOR%


----+++ Speaker: [[http://www.cs.uu.nl/~eelco][Eelco Dolstra]] 

----+++ Title:   Nix: A Safe and Policy-Free System for Software Deployment

----+++ Authors: [[http://www.cs.uu.nl/~eelco][Eelco Dolstra]], [[http://www.cs.uu.nl/~mdejonge][Merijn de Jonge]] and [[http://www.cs.uu.nl/~visser][Eelco Visser]]

----+++ Note: This is a practice talk for LISA-2004 (http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa04/) next week in Atlanta.



----+++ Abstract


Existing systems for software deployment are neither safe nor sufficiently
flexible.  Primary safety issues are the inability to enforce reliable
specification of component dependencies, and the 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.

Full paper: http://www.cs.uu.nl/~eelco/pubs/nspfssd-lisa2004-final.pdf