NixOS paper accepted at ICFP!

The paper “NixOS: A Purely Functional Linux Distribution” (by Eelco Dolstra and Andres Löh) has been accepted for presentation at the 2008 International Conference on Functional Programming (ICFP). It describes NixOS in much greater detail than last year’s HotOS paper, and argues why the purely functional style and features such as laziness are important for system configuration management. It also provides some measurements on the actual purity of Nix build actions. A draft of the paper is available.