Nix: A Solution With Problems

TL;DR

This paper reviews the current state of research on Nix, a functional package manager, highlighting its solutions to deployment issues and the new problems it introduces.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive literature review on Nix, analyzing its strengths, limitations, and directions for future research in software deployment.

Findings

Nix addresses reproducibility and dependency issues in software deployment.

Nix introduces new problems like trust and granular incremental builds.

The paper discusses proposed solutions from the Nix community.

Abstract

Software deployment suffers from numerous problems pertaining, for example, to reproducibility and dependency resolution. Many of these problems have been successfully solved by the purely functional approach to package management implemented in the Nix project. However, Nix does not solve all issues, and it does introduces some novel problems of its own. Therefore, the aim of this thesis is to conduct a literature review on the current state of research on Nix and to determine the direction of future research. The first part of this paper explores the problems historically faced in different areas of software deployment, e.g., irreproducibility and dependency resolution issues. The main four categories of software deployment tools analyzed are build systems, package managers, configuration management, and development environments. Popular software from each category serve as case studies to illustrate the problems. The second part introduces Nix and explains the methods utilized to solve some of the problems introduced in the earlier part. Because Nix is the first large project to utilize the purely functional approach, it is far from a perfect solution. Thus, the third part is dedicated to analyzing the new problems that Nix introduces, as well as old problems, which Nix has been unable to solve, such as trust and granular incremental builds. Furthermore, some proposed state of the art solutions put forth by the Nix community are discussed.