Nix: The Purely Functional Package Manager
‘a powerful package manager for Linux and other Unix systems that makes package management reliable and reproducible. It provides atomic upgrades and rollbacks, side-by-side installation of multiple versions of a package, multi-user package management and easy setup of build environments. ‘ Basically, this is a third-party open source reimplementation of Amazon’s (excellent) internal packaging system, using symlinks to versioned package directories to ensure atomicity and the ability to roll back. This is definitely the *right* way to build packages — I know what tool I’ll be pushing for, next time this question comes up. See also nixos.org for a Linux distro built on Nix.
(tags: ops linux devops unix packaging distros nix nixos atomic upgrades rollback versioning)