What does HackerNews think of nix-bundle?

“Make” as a static site generator (2022) | Sep 2023

> (Thankfully full-blown simulation is often an option nowadays too)

Yes, and I think its fair to assume that some backend to execute the x86-64 Linux ABI will out-live most readers.

Projects like https://justine.lol/ape.html, https://guix.gnu.org/manual/en/html_node/Invoking-guix-pack.... or https://github.com/matthewbauer/nix-bundle do make it approachable to "bundle" a lot of software down to libc.

Our Fastest, Most Beautiful Release Ever: Thunderbird 115 “Supernova” Is Here | Jul 2023

I admit that there is an element of, "but I chose an obscure and challenging linux variant, waaah why isn't it supported" here, but (a) there's currently no flatpak and (b) when, for goodness sakes, will major linux projects begin packaging for Nix/NixOS as a matter of course?

It's not hard, and the benefits go far outside merely supporting Nix, as e.g. a flake.nix file would allow this project to generate docker images, and appImage images, as basically afterthoughts. (See e.g. https://github.com/matthewbauer/nix-bundle.)

Nix flake support would also provide a perfectly reproducible build environment, which can help clarify dependencies, and thus help the project build achieve idempotence, but I'll save the full shill for some github issue.

In fact, I'm inclined to roll up my shirtsleeves and help make this real, at least for Thunderbird.

PS. there is also the fact that the Thunderbird provided downloadable tar.bz2 is not usable under nix, which makes this problem more pressing.

PPS. Yes, I know about steam-run. Which, btw, works here. All the same, weird that I have to go get some random steam-related thing to make thunderbird happy, right? https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/522822/different-me...

Docker is deleting Open Source organisations - what you need to know | Mar 2023

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On systems that have the same containerization feature that Docker requires, i.e., Linux systems with recent kernels, you can use nix-bundle¹ or the flakes-based experimental command inspired by it, `nix bundle`² to generate an all-in-one binary that you can run without installing Nix on the target.

1: https://github.com/matthewbauer/nix-bundle

2: https://github.com/NixOS/bundlers

Flatpak Is Not the Future | Nov 2021

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Nix itself is more focused on "distribute from this host with nix, to this other host with nix".

Though, here is e.g. https://github.com/matthewbauer/nix-bundle, which is supported as an experimental command in nix 2.4.