junest VS archlinux-repro

Explore the Junest Git project and follow the installation instructions. Activate the environment with junest setup and enable the running-from-host options.

PS: about JuNest (see https://github.com/fsquillace/junest ) this is a lightweight Arch Linux based distro that runs, without root privileges, on top of any other Linux distro. I also suggest to take a look at it.

About JuNest, all the apps installed using it whave always worked well for me. I've also wrote a script and done a pull request (rejected) for a tool that exports the apps to the launcher (as distrobox-export already do) https://github.com/fsquillace/junest/pull/322

JuNest https://github.com/fsquillace/junest looks very complete and good, though I dislike the approach of having to download or build an image. It would be nice to be able to do stuff like clone my filesystem (already ZFS) and branch an environment off that instantly.

I have already done a PR (see here)to the main repository https://github.com/fsquillace/junest but I still get errors in merging this utility during the automatic github-action's test/check. Any idea?

- I have pacman installed through junest. It works for command line programs, did not test for gui software

Have you tried installing JuNest? It will allow you to download, install, and use Arch's precompiled binaries directly (in addition to making it easy to compile, install, and use AUR packages).

As for the rest, I've been testing stuff with distrobox, junest (which is like distrobox, but for arch guest and without the container), and Conty (a lot like Junest but as a single hyper-compressed executable file). Anything requiring an escalation or wanting actual access to root remains an issue, but for the most part, it works well enough.

Arch Linux is heavily invested into it:

- https://reproducible.archlinux.org/ - Attempts to reproduce the distributed binary packages from source using reproducible builds tooling. This already works for a big chunk of packages.

- https://github.com/archlinux/archlinux-repro - This is a wrapper for Arch Linux build tooling that creates a build environment in a container that has the same packages installed as the original build environment back then. Software is expected to build reproducible in this environment and many ecosystems already do by default (Rust for example, to name one).

- https://github.com/kpcyrd/rebuilderd - This monitors the packages in Arch Linux, runs archlinux-repro on all of them and hosts the results. There are other projects supported but Arch Linux works best at the moment, and archlinux-repro offers the best integration I'm currently aware of.

There are surprisingly few people interested in running this stack on their own for verification purpose though.

Yes, many times.

Arch reproduces all published packages and reproducing a package as a user is as simple as running `repro pkgname.pkg.tar.gz`.

https://reproducible.archlinux.org/

https://github.com/archlinux/archlinux-repro

Do note we have multiple rebuilders. The tooling is written so you should be able to reproduce Arch packages on any distribution, but we still struggle with packages embedding "uname" into the binaries still.

You need to use https://github.com/archlinux/archlinux-repro and set the CACHEDIR to the correct location with all the packages used in the build.