[Nix-dev] AppImage

[Mateusz Czaplinski]

Personally, after seeing the articles I also thought about Nix and how
they relate, but after some time I too now think they're rather
complementary, serving quite different needs and with different pros &
cons. Specifically, what I value very highly in Nix is the declarative
specification and ease of upgrading + downgrading. OTOH, as of now the
AppImage model seems easier for casual end-users, and for
userspace-only deployments, while NixOS is more of a
"total-conversion'' (though Nix in theory can be used userspace-only
too at the cost of full recompilations, right?). Also, as to Nix, I'm
quite excited by a potential perspective of maybe using it some day on
Windows too, as well as other platforms (esp. Genode).

/Mateusz.

On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 4:00 PM, Anand Patil
<anand.prabhakar.patil at gmail.com> wrote:
> Having only read the front page, it looks like it could be complementary to
> Nix. You could develop and build in Nix for reproducibility, efficiency and
> completeness. Then, for portable deployment, you could run nix2appimage or
> else include AppImageKit in a derivation and write the AppImage to $out. It
> would be like using Nix to build a statically linked binary or a Docker
> image.
>
> On Sat, Feb 27, 2016 at 9:29 AM Vladimír Čunát <vcunat at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> On 02/27/2016 03:00 PM, Kevin Cox wrote:
>> > So while I think it is cool that it is simply a binary you can run you
>> > obviously lose out on the efficiency of Nix.
>>
>> The aims seem significantly different. Appimage and many others
>> evidently focus on creating bundles that "just work" everywhere. That
>> was never among the (main) objectives of Nix, although you can make it
>> create similar bundles.
>>
>> --Vladimir
>>
>>
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