Technical Talk - Nix: the purely functional package manager

Julian, the organizer of the Python meetup group, has invited me give a talk about the Nix package manager to his colleagues at CyVerse, and has allowed me to open the event to members of this group.

We have a room reserved in the Bioscience Research Lab building. If we need to change rooms based on the number of attendees, this event will be updated with the new room.

I understand the midday time may not work for many members, so I am happy to give this talk again at a time closer to our usual evening meeting time of 6:30, if there is interest.

Abstract:

One doesn't have to use a computer for very long before running into problems with software deployment. Software that fails to install, systems that break after upgrades, dependency conflicts... Why is moving working software from computer to another so difficult?

This talk will examine some issues with the way software deployments are currently managed, discuss how the "purely functional" approach of the Nix package manager addresses many of these problems, give a crash-course introduction to working with Nix, and cover some limitations and caveats to using Nix.