[willscott]

The note on Timeless at the end is very exciting.

https://repeatr.io/welcome/what-is-timeless/ explains timeless as a set of tooling for reproducible builds with a broader and more hash-based mandate than what's out there currently. While early, it seems like it's a reasonable path towards getting a reproducible system that won't fall apart as fast over time, by vendoring the dependency system in the same way modern language-specific package managers do, but at a language-agnostic/distribution level.

[qqii]

Looks like there's some overlap with nixOS, Guix and https://reproducible-builds.org/. I'm pretty glad that there's been a lot of work in this space, especially https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2019/guix-reduces-bootstrap-seed-b...

[RaitoBezarius]

Is there any particular difference with https://nixos.org/nix/ which is backed by academia and has years of experience? Never heard about Timeless though.

FWIW, I'm using Nix to package Android app builds in a reproducible way (for React Native apps).

[qqii]

I've gone through their website and I think I have a reasonable grasp of the difference. Unlike NixOS and Guix which enforce a store, all builds are performed in a container[0] and produce a self contained executable[1].

I speculate that the container approach will make porting slightly easier as dependancies can be placed where they are expected, thus no patches are required for project build systems. On the other hand producing a self contained executable seems more difficult, and I wonder if they'll go with an AppImage like approach to minimise patches required.

Overall the vision has overlap but the end result is very different from that of NixOS and Guix.

[0]:

> Typically, we use an executor which uses “linux containers”. However, for the most part, we try to consider that an implementation detail. Executors might also be simple chroots; or virtual machines; or other interesting kinds of sandboxing. Nor are executors strictly limited to the Linux operating system; it's simply the most common place to work. https://repeatr.io/design/executors/

[1]:

> Radix “Packages” are similar to packages from other linux distributions… however, we're aiming to do something not like linux distributions: our vision for Radix Packages is that they go anywhere, with or without the rest of a distro associated with them. https://repeatr.io/welcome/what-is-radix/