``The deployment role is a role that is often overlooked much to the pain of the users. ‘’ writes Robert Bogue in a series about roles in software engineering. He forgets to mention the Nix Deployment System unfortunately. In Bogue’s world (which is most of the world) software deployment is mostly a craft that has to be repeated for each and ever application to be installed, and one has to pray that a carefully crafted installation program will not break on the target machine. Nix expressions encode all the dependencies of an application, and once tested succesfully, deployment consists of transmitting the closure of those dependencies, in order to guarantee that everything is present at the target site.
Managed desktops, the next step for Nix? Chad Dickerson writes about outsourcing the management of desktop systems. We have been getting quite good at managing all aspects of services with Nix. That is, management of all software components and their configuration in one formalism. Examples are our subversion and Wiki servers. It would be great if this can be expanded to an entire desktop environment.
By the way, I found these items on ACM's careernews.