nix-ros-overlay VS distrobox

I believe this might be due to me also using the ROS overlay for Nix (https://github.com/lopsided98/nix-ros-overlay). Some packages that I'm using from ROS also require PCL, so I suspect that Nix might be ignoring my CUDA-enabled overlay and using the regular PCL package in order to meet the required dependencies. I'm not too sure how to confirm this...

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

That seems more like Distrobox to me(?) https://distrobox.it/

Regarding the stability issue on a dev machine - you may be interested in playing with one of the immutable-os distros, such as SilverBlue (fedora based).

The high-level take-away is you can't break your actual OS since it's root filesystem is read-only, and you use "pet" containers (on docker, podman, whatever) to do your work in. Applications are either sandboxed via Flatpak, or installed/run inside your pet containers. If your pet container dies, you cry about it for a moment, and when you're ready you get a new one - your actual os and other containers remain unaffected.

I use distrobox[1] to create/run the pet containers.

[1] https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox

Distrobox is a tool that enables us to try Linux distro CLI, including their package manager. This requires a containerization tool (e.g., Docker). In Windows, this can be achieved using WSL (Windows Subsystem for Linux)

I use containerized versions of things, ubuntu and chainguard images mostly.

You can always create containers with init if that's how you want to do that though. Some distros publish images that come that way: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/useful_...

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38505448 ... https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/useful_...

Yes, you can do that but I've seen others use something like distrobox to run linux inside of SteamOS: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/posts/steamdeck_guide.md

For such cases you might use something like this: https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox

Btw #3: Depending on what the user is trying to accomplish, e.g. maybe to make WSL(2) itself more of a "subsystem" than a "container engine", using something like Distrobox or nsbox.dev can be a good idea (along with Docker or Podman in Distrobox's case; the other one uses systemd-nspawn).

1. Find here in "Containers Distros" section the distro image that you want to install ("Toolbox" versions are better because they are configured for Distrobox) and get it URL: https://distrobox.it/compatibility/#containers-distros 2. Use that URL to create Distrobox: distrobox create -i registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-toolbox:39 -n fedora_1_39 3. Enter Distrobox fedora_1_39: distrobox enter fedora_1_39 4. You are already in Distrobox console. Look at the name in console, it should be include the container name. 5. To exit Distrobox: exit 6. If you run: distrobox list you will see all distroboxes on the system. You will also see that distrobox that we exited is still running. 7. To stop distrobox use commands: distrobox stop fedora_1_39