Re: Building container images with nix2container

[Simon Tournier <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com>]

Hi Antoine,

Reading this blog post:

    https://lewo.abesis.fr/posts/nix-build-container-image/

and from my understanding, “guix pack” is currently something similar to
’dockerTools.buildImage’ [1]

On lun., 26 févr. 2024 at 18:33, Simon Tournier <zimon.toutoune@gmail.com> wrote:

> Well, I have not followed on which strategy Guix relies.  What is the
> one of nix2container?  The one described here:
>
>     https://grahamc.com/blog/nix-and-layered-docker-images/

To answer to my question, the way to build the container image is
different, hence it does not make much sense to speak about a
“strategy“. :-)

However, the blog post says:

        To address this issue, we could add a nonReproducible option in
        the containerTools.buildLayer function. Instead of only storing
        the digest, we would also store the tar. Note in practice, an
        important part of nixpkgs is bit reproducible and this would
        rarely be needed.

And so the question is how do you know beforehand if the flag
’nonReproducible’ must be applied or not?

Indeed, the approach of nix2container could be helpful in addition to
‘guix pack’.  Maybe an extension… :-)

Cheers,
simon