nix-ros-overlay VS rfcs

Compare nix-ros-overlay vs rfcs and see what are their differences.

nix-ros-overlay

ROS overlay for the Nix package manager (by lopsided98)

rfcs

The Nix community RFCs (by NixOS)
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nix-ros-overlay rfcs
3 46
158 476
- 6.3%
9.0 5.0
5 days ago 2 days ago
Nix
Apache License 2.0 Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike 4.0
The number of mentions indicates the total number of mentions that we've tracked plus the number of user suggested alternatives.
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For example, an activity of 9.0 indicates that a project is amongst the top 10% of the most actively developed projects that we are tracking.

nix-ros-overlay

Posts with mentions or reviews of nix-ros-overlay. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2022-10-27.
  • tell me one thing you don't like about ROS
    5 projects | /r/ROS | 27 Oct 2022
  • Nix is the ultimate DevOps toolkit
    21 projects | news.ycombinator.com | 9 Apr 2021
    Thanks for the response!

    > This is difficult to answer without knowing more details.

    The situation specifically is the ROS ecosystem, where metadata is managed in these package.xml files:

    https://github.com/ros2/rclcpp/blob/master/rclcpp/package.xm...

    The federated nature of the ecosystem has led to a culture where it's very normal to be building dozens of these at once, in the same workspace together, often from multiple repos (the repo above has four in it). So there are several build tools which automate the work of examining a source workspace and building all the packages within it in the correct topological order, respecting build_depend tags. The newest of these tools (colcon) has actually made the package.xml optional in many cases, as it can examine CMakelists, setup.py, BUILD, etc, and discover for itself what the dependencies are.

    Your "distribution" of ROS is formed by listing all the packages and repos in this big file, for which there is other tooling to manage pulling dependency sources, whatever: https://github.com/ros/rosdistro/blob/master/foxy/distributi...

    Anyway, so the existing ROS/nix efforts (1) seem to basically consume all of this package/distribution metadata at once and generate a giant parallel structure of nix definitions (eg https://github.com/lopsided98/nix-ros-overlay/blob/master/di...), which I fear would be completely opaque to users and any system which required everyone to leave behind these existing workflows would be an immediate non-starter.

    I think the ideal scenario (and what it would look like if I built this myself based on debs) would be that you could source the "base" workspace as usual (enter the nix-shell?), and check out source, build packages as usual with colcon, the usual workspace-building tool, but there'd be an extra plugin/verb/flag for it, which would make it build each package as a nix package instead of into the usual installspace. The verb would generate the nix definitions on the fly, and probably handle the invocation and build-parallelism side of it as well.

    [1]: https://github.com/acowley/ros2nix, https://github.com/lopsided98/nix-ros-overlay

rfcs

Posts with mentions or reviews of rfcs. We have used some of these posts to build our list of alternatives and similar projects. The last one was on 2024-03-19.

What are some alternatives?

When comparing nix-ros-overlay and rfcs you can also consider the following projects:

not-os - An operating system generator, based on NixOS, that, given a config, outputs a small (47 MB), read-only squashfs for a runit-based operating system, with support for iPXE and signed boot.

haskell-nix - Nix and Haskell in production

nixpkgs - Nix Packages collection & NixOS

rosdistro - This repo maintains a lists of repositories for each ROS distribution

spack - A flexible package manager that supports multiple versions, configurations, platforms, and compilers.

nix - Nix, the purely functional package manager

emacs-overlay - Bleeding edge emacs overlay [maintainer=@adisbladis]

nix-1p - A (more or less) one page introduction to Nix, the language.

nix-darwin - nix modules for darwin

nixos-generators - Collection of image builders [maintainer=@Lassulus]

Home Manager using Nix - Manage a user environment using Nix [maintainer=@rycee]

asdf - Extendable version manager with support for Ruby, Node.js, Elixir, Erlang & more