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18th Large Installation System Administration Conference — Abstract
Pp. 79–92 of the Proceedings
Nix: A Safe and Policy-Free System for Software Deployment
Eelco Dolstra, Merijn de Jonge, and Eelco Visser, Utrecht University
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.
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