Packaging idea (Re: What next?)

Joe Desbonnet jdesbonnet at gmail.com
Thu Jun 2 20:21:19 UTC 2005


This is probably science fiction from FC's perspective, but I came
across this interesting paper when researching software updates via
binary patches recently:

http://www.cs.uu.nl/people/eelco/pubs/eupfcdm-cbse2005-final.pdf

Abstract. Safe and efficient deployment of software components is an
important aspect of CBSE. The Nix deployment system enables side-by-side 
deployment of different versions and variants of components, complete 
installation, safe upgrades, and safe uninstalls through garbage
collection. It accomplishes this through a purely functional deployment
model, meaning that the file system content of a component only depends
on the inputs used to build it, and never changes afterwards. An apparent 
downside to this model is that upgrading "fundamental" components
used as build inputs by many other components becomes expensive, since
all of these must be rebuilt and redeployed. In this paper we show that
binary patching between sets of components enables efficient deployment
of upgrades in the purely functional model, transparently to users. 
Sequences of patches can be combined automatically to enable upgrading
between arbitrary versions. The approach was empirically validated.


On 6/2/05, Nicolas Mailhot <Nicolas.Mailhot at laposte.net> wrote:
> Le jeudi 02 juin 2005 à 01:03 -0400, Konstantin Ryabitsev a écrit :
> 
> > A super-package mechanism would help create a framework that would
> > allow addressing the problems listed above.
> 
> A super-package mechanism would add yet another layer of vendor mess
> over the existing layers of vendor mess.
> 
> Sometimes less is more.
> 
> --
> Nicolas Mailhot
> 
> 
> BodyID:264713259.2.n.logpart (stored separately)
> 
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