Show HN: Brioche – A new Nix-like package manager

• nixpkgs

  1,006 18,417 10.0 Nix

  Nix Packages collection & NixOS

  

• SaaSHub

  www.saashub.com featured

  SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

  

• porkg

  1 6 6.2 Rust

  

  I'm also exploring a post-Nix package manager, wip: https://github.com/porkg/porkg

  My mantra has been to avoid "getting bored" and inventing DSLs for the longest time. I initially sought to use Nickel-lang, but it was missing some features that would make it an ideal candidate for this. I started writing my own (you may find this in the history) before realizing "WTF are you doing writing another shitty DSL?" I have subsequently decided that shell scripts (or anything you can shebang) are good enough, i.e. pkgbuild inspiration.

  I also plan to avoid making a derivation the source of reproducibility. Instead, a lockfile will offer that. This should alleviate the issue whereby updating the like of glibc cascades into an entire rebuild.

  Any *OS and home-manager would need to bring in a configuration language. I think Cue really makes the most sense, but that's still a long way off.

• cue

  117 5,158 9.9 Go

  The home of the CUE language! Validate and define text-based and dynamic configuration

  

  Agreed on all counts, especially the central issue with nix and the properties that I'd want out of a replacement. I think CUE ( https://cuelang.org/ ) is a perfect language for this.

• brioche-packages

  1 25 9.3 TypeScript

  Brioche packages, which get auto-published to the Brioche Registry

  

  Nushell has definitely been on my radar for a while! but I missed DetSys was playing around with it, I'll have to give that a look

  One neat thing about Brioche is that Bash isn't really baked into it the same way as the Nix ecosystem. In a lot of the docs and examples, I used the `std.runBash` Brioche function for running scripts, but that's a fairly simple 11-line function[^1]. I wanted to make it just as easy to add `runZsh`, `runFish`, `runNushell`, etc. functions that work just as well as Bash (and they could either be put in the std library or in their own packages). So hopefully, there will be a Brioche `runNushell` function in the near future :)

  [^1]: https://github.com/brioche-dev/brioche-packages/blob/9fd5109...

• devbox

  58 8,903 9.6 Go

  Instant, easy, and predictable development environments

  

  There's also [devbox](https://github.com/jetify-com/devbox).

  Tried a lot of them, and after a while I found the nix the package manager requires too many workarounds. Things don't just work. For example, installing alacritty requires an OpenGL wrapper. Neovim can't find libraries to build some plugins. Basically, anything GUI had issues.

  In the end, `cargo install`, `go install` and download a release archive from github are simpler to script for most of the tools I use.

• garn

  5 257 9.4 TypeScript

  garn is a build tool and environment manager that replaces justfiles/makefiles, docker, and the annoying parts of READMEs. The builders lingua franca.

  

  Looks awesome! Congrats on the release. I would be curious to hear your thoughts on how this compares to garn [1], a typescript front end to the existing nixpkgs ecosystem.

  1: https://garn.io/

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