unnix: Reproducible Nix environments without installing Nix
16 points by knl
16 points by knl
Are you aware of mise? I wonder if those two tools could cooperate somehow. I'm personally a Nix user, but I was recently thinking to try and sell mise at my new workplace & project. I wonder if maybe unnix could for example parse and use mise files? Just loose thoughts, not sure if that could work, and I only skimmed unnix's readme for now; FWIW the idea sounds very interesting to me!
Hi, creator of unnix here! I have heard of mise and briefly mentioned it in my NixOS Discourse post.
Unnix is a lot smaller in scope, and doesn't provide anything like task runners or plugins support. It doesn't require the maintenance of any registry other than Nixpkgs (compared to mise: [1] [2] [3]). It's also closer integrated with the Nix ecosystem. If you have your own hydra and binary cache setup, it's very easy to add it to your unnix manifest. Everything is self contained in the manifest file. Support for other resolvers like buildbot-nix and hercules-ci are planned too.
I'm also aware of mise-nix. I think unnix would work great as a mise backend alternative to mise-nix, so you get to use mise's features like tasks with Nixpkgs's backing without having to install Nix.
A tool I've toyed a bit in an adjacent space is nix-portable, but I've never managed to wrestle it to do something useful (i.e. use flakes in our work repos).
I don't like there's an easy way to do Nix stuff outside NixOS without root, daemons, and that sort of stuff. I know Nix or something Nix-like might be the future, but for a good while I've been working on stuff where... I don't feel so much pain from unreproducible environments. (E.g. mostly everything I need is in Debian Stable or a binary download away.)