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This. I would love to have a minimal host machine setup while having all those elaborate dev dependencies and command line tools I downloaded from somewhere run

This. I would love to have a minimal host machine setup while having all those elaborate dev dependencies and command line tools I downloaded from somewhere run inside their own isolated container (or at least within one single container for my entire $SOFTWARE_PROJECT). Basically, I'm trying to imagine a world where every Bash script needs to come with headers specifiying binary dependencies and file paths (and env vars) it wants to access. Upon invoking said script, it gets executed within a light-weight container, the binary dependencies then get installed on-the-fly and the file paths get mounted into the container (after I've confirmed that the script may access them).

pxc 5y ago
> Basically, I'm trying to imagine a world where every Bash script needs to come with headers specifiying binary dependencies and file paths (and env vars) it wants to access. Upon invoking said script, it gets executed within a light-weight container, the binary dependencies then get installed on-the-fly and the file paths get mounted into the container (after I've confirmed that the script may access them). There are pieces of this that have been implemented in Nix, Distri, and Flatpak. Binary dependencies getting installed on the fly used to be something you could enable systemwide on NixOS, and parts of it still can be. There are also FUSE filesystems that can automatically build/fetch paths as they're requested. DwarfFS, for fetching debug symbols, is the first one I'd heard of, and then there were some experiments like this in Distri. In Nixpkgs, scripts built by b Nix are created in a way that bundles in the executables they call by interpolating in full paths to deterministically built versions. In Flatpak you have this notion of portals, where you declare file paths and other things where your program is allowed to talk to anything else. It seems a little more seamless than sharing the filesystem on Docker. I think this is pretty achievable in the moderate term.
- codethief 5y ago
  I'm aware of Nix and know this is achievable – in theory. To really work well and be convenient it would have to be used everywhere, though. https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ comes to mind.

pxc 5y ago

> Basically, I'm trying to imagine a world where every Bash script needs to come with headers specifiying binary dependencies and file paths (and env vars) it wants to access. Upon invoking said script, it gets executed within a light-weight container, the binary dependencies then get installed on-the-fly and the file paths get mounted into the container (after I've confirmed that the script may access them). There are pieces of this that have been implemented in Nix, Distri, and Flatpak. Binary dependencies getting installed on the fly used to be something you could enable systemwide on NixOS, and parts of it still can be. There are also FUSE filesystems that can automatically build/fetch paths as they're requested. DwarfFS, for fetching debug symbols, is the first one I'd heard of, and then there were some experiments like this in Distri. In Nixpkgs, scripts built by b Nix are created in a way that bundles in the executables they call by interpolating in full paths to deterministically built versions. In Flatpak you have this notion of portals, where you declare file paths and other things where your program is allowed to talk to anything else. It seems a little more seamless than sharing the filesystem on Docker. I think this is pretty achievable in the moderate term.

codethief 5y ago
I'm aware of Nix and know this is achievable – in theory. To really work well and be convenient it would have to be used everywhere, though. https://xkcd.com/927/ https://xkcd.com/927/ comes to mind.