Nix is a system for controlling the automatic creation and distribution of data, such as computer programs and other software artifacts. This is a very general problem, and there are many applications that fall under this description. Build management tools are used to perform software builds, that is, the construction of derived products such as executable programs from source code. A commonly used build tool is Make, which is a standard tool on Unix systems. These tools have to deal with several issues: After software has been built, is must also be deployed in the intended target environment, e.g., the user's workstation. Examples include the Red Hat package manager (RPM), Microsoft's MSI, and so on. Here also we have to deal with several issues: The creation of packages from some formal description of what artifacts should be distributed in the package. The deployment of packages, that is, the mechanism by which we get them onto the intended target environment. This can be as simple as copying a file, but complexity comes from the wide range of possible installation media (such as a network install), and the scalability of the process (if a program must be installed on a thousand systems, we do not want to visit each system and perform some manual steps to install the program on that system; that is, the complexity for the system administrator should be constant, not linear). ... Existing tools in this field generally both a underlying model (such as the derivation graph of build tools, or the versioning scheme that determines when two packages are compatible in a package management system) and a formalism that allows ... Following the principle of separation of mechanism and policy, the Nix system separates the low-level aspect of file system object management form the high-level aspect of the ... Bla bla Bla bla Bla bla Nix uses Sleepycat's Berkeley DB and CWI's ATerm library. However, these are fetched automatically as part of the build process. Other than that, you need a good C++ compiler. GCC 2.95 does not appear to work; please use GCC 3.x. Nix can be obtained from its Subversion repository. For example, the following command will check out the latest revision into a directory called nix: $ svn checkout http://losser.st-lab.cs.uu.nl:12080/repos/trace/nix/trunk nix Likewise, specific releases can be obtained from the tags directory of the repository. If you don't have Subversion, you can download a compressed tar-file of the latest revision of the repository. To build Nix, do the following: $ autoreconf -i $ ./configure options... $ make $ make install Currently, the only useful switch for configure is --prefix=prefix to specify where Nix is to be installed. The default installation directory is /nix. You can change this to any location you like. You should ensure that you have write permission to the installation prefix. It is advisable not to change the installation prefix, since doing so will in all likelihood make it impossible to use derivates built on other systems. If Nix or Fix appear to hang immediately after they are started, Nix's database is probably wedged, i.e., some process died while it held a lock on the database. The solution is to ensure that no other processes are accessing the database and then run the following command: $ db_recover -e -h prefix/var/nix/db Here, prefix should be replaced by Nix's installation prefix. Every time a Nix database transaction takes place, Nix writes a record of this transaction to a log in its database directory to ensure that the operation can be replayed in case of a application or system crash. However, without manual intervention, the log grows indefinitely. Hence, unused log files should be deleted periodically. This can be accomplished using the following command: $ rm `db_archive -a -h prefix/var/nix/db` Nix should automatically recover the Berkeley DB database. Nix should automatically remove Berkeley DB logfiles.