Journal of Functional Programming http://journals.cambridge.org/JFP Additional services for Journal of Functional Programming: Email alerts: Click here Subscriptions: Click here Commercial reprints: Click here Terms of use : Click here NixOS: A purely functional Linux distribution EELCO DOLSTRA, ANDRES LÖH and NICOLAS PIERRON Journal of Functional Programming / Volume 20 / Special Issue 56 / November 2010, pp 577 615 DOI: 10.1017/S0956796810000195, Published online: 15 October 2010 Link to this article: http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0956796810000195 How to cite this article: EELCO DOLSTRA, ANDRES LÖH and NICOLAS PIERRON (2010). NixOS: A purely functional Linux distribution. Journal of Functional Programming,20, pp 577615 doi:10.1017/ S0956796810000195 Request Permissions : Click here Downloaded from http://journals.cambridge.org/JFP, by Username: nrnr, IP address: 108.20.67.9 on 31 Aug 2012 JFP 20 (5 & 6): 577–615, 2011. c Cambridge University Press 2010 577 doi:10.1017/S0956796810000195 First published online 15 October 2010 NixOS: A purely functional Linux distribution EELCO DOLSTRA Department of Software Technology, Delft University of Technology, Postbus 5031, 2600 GA Delft, The Netherlands (e-mail:
[email protected]) ANDRES LOH¨ Department of Information and Computing Sciences, Utrecht University, Postbus 80 . 089, 3508 TB Utrecht, The Netherlands (e-mail:
[email protected]) NICOLAS PIERRON EPITA Research and Development Laboratory, 14-16 rue Voltaire, 94276 Le Kremlin-Bicetreˆ cedex, France (e-mail:
[email protected]) Abstract Existing package and system configuration management tools suffer from an imperative model, where system administration actions such as package upgrades or changes to system configuration files are stateful: they destructively update the state of the system.