- Published on Thu Mar 17 2005

The paper “Efficient Upgrading in a Purely Functional Component Deployment Model” has been accepted at CBSE 2005. It describes how we can deploy updates to Nix packages efficiently, even if “fundamental” packages like Glibc are updated (which cause a rebuild of all dependent packages), by deploying binary patches between components in the Nix store. Includes techniques such as patch chaining and computing deltas between archive files. ...

- Published on Mon Aug 22 2005

The paper “Service Configuration Management” (accepted at the 12th International Workshop on Software Configuration Management) describes how we can rather easily deploy “services” (e.g., complete webserver configurations such as our Subversion server) through Nix by treating the non-component parts (such as configuration files, control scripts and static data) as components that are built by Nix expressions. The result is that all advantages that Nix offers to software deployment also extend to service deployment, such as the ability to easily have multiple configuration side by side, to roll back configurations, and to identify the precise dependencies of a configuration. ...

- Published on Sun Aug 28 2005

The paper “Secure Sharing Between Untrusted Users in a Transparent Source/Binary Deployment Model” has been accepted at ASE 2005. This paper describes how a Nix store can be securely shared by multiple users who may not trust each other; i.e., how do we prevent one user from installing a Trojan horse that is subsequently executed by some other user? ...

- Published on Sun Oct 16 2005

Nix 0.9 has been released. This is a new major release that provides quite a few performance improvements and bug fixes, as well as a number of new features. Read the release notes for details. ...

- Published on Fri Oct 21 2005

Nix 0.9.2 has been released released. This is a bug fix release that addresses some problems on Mac OS X. ...