The Odin system: an object manager for extensible software environments
The Odin system: an object manager for extensible software environments
Conception, evolution, and application of functional programming languages
ACM Computing Surveys (CSUR)
Space efficient conservative garbage collection
PLDI '93 Proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN 1993 conference on Programming language design and implementation
Post-design Domain-Specific Language Embedding: A Case Study in the Software Engineering Domain
HICSS '02 Proceedings of the 35th Annual Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS'02)-Volume 9 - Volume 9
Imposing a Memory Management Discipline on Software Deployment
Proceedings of the 26th International Conference on Software Engineering
A principled approach to operating system construction in Haskell
Proceedings of the tenth ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming
Secure sharing between untrusted users in a transparent source/binary deployment model
Proceedings of the 20th IEEE/ACM international Conference on Automated software engineering
Making system configuration more declarative
HOTOS'05 Proceedings of the 10th conference on Hot Topics in Operating Systems - Volume 10
Experience report: using functional programming to manage a linux distribution
ICFP '07 Proceedings of the 12th ACM SIGPLAN international conference on Functional programming
Package upgrades in FOSS distributions: details and challenges
Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Hot Topics in Software Upgrades
Atomic upgrading of distributed systems
Proceedings of the 1st International Workshop on Hot Topics in Software Upgrades
Software deployment in a dynamic cloud: From device to service orientation in a hospital environment
CLOUD '09 Proceedings of the 2009 ICSE Workshop on Software Engineering Challenges of Cloud Computing
Towards maintainer script modernization in FOSS distributions
Proceedings of the 1st international workshop on Open component ecosystems
An implementation of the Linux software repository model for other operating systems
Proceedings of the 2nd International Workshop on Hot Topics in Software Upgrades
The open theory standard theory library
NFM'11 Proceedings of the Third international conference on NASA Formal methods
Supporting software evolution in component-based FOSS systems
Science of Computer Programming
Proceedings of the 2013 ACM SIGPLAN symposium on Haskell
Disnix: A toolset for distributed deployment
Science of Computer Programming
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Existing package and system configuration management tools suffer from an imperative model, where system administration actions such as upgrading packages or changes to system configuration files are stateful: they destructively update the state of the system. This leads to many problems, such as the inability to roll back changes easily, to run multiple versions of a package side-by-side, to reproduce a configuration deterministically on another machine, or to reliably upgrade a system. In this paper we show that we can overcome these problems by moving to a purely functional system configuration model. This means that all static parts of a system (such as software packages, configuration files and system startup scripts) are built by pure functions and are immutable, stored in a way analogously to a heap in a purely function language. We have implemented this model in NixOS, a non-trivial Linux distribution that uses the Nix package manager to build the entire system configuration from a purely functional specification.