from Hacker News

Stagex – Container-native, full-source bootstrapped, and reproducible toolchain

by robinhoodexe on 3/5/25, 12:09 PM with 16 comments

  • by charmonium on 3/7/25, 7:57 PM

    Why does the "Comparison" table show "Nix" as "No" for "Containerized"? One can [run Nix in containerized environments](https://nix.dev/manual/nix/2.24/installation/installing-dock...), [build containerized environments from Nix](https://nix.dev/tutorials/nixos/building-and-running-docker-...), and [even run Nix-generated environments directly in containerd through a plugin](https://github.com/pdtpartners/nix-snapshotter/blob/main/doc...). I believe the former two apply to Guix as well which is also marked as "No" for "Containerized".

  • by Imustaskforhelp on 3/5/25, 5:36 PM

    This is absolutely great ! , something absolutely minimalist instead of nix os , that being said , I am interested in seeing full source bootstrapped point within wasm / libriscv as well.

    Personally I wish that this can somehow be even more "better" in my opinion if this can replace containers themselves. I had once seen somebody comment that they wanted to create a gcloud course and wanted to provide a shell like environment with all gcloud tools etc., that too , cross platform but they felt docker was too heavy for such use case , so they used nix for it.

    I am also wondering how cool this can be where this can be used to create things like appimage or all the other things. Since this is reproducible, we can create a such dockerfile to .deb / .pkg.tar.zst and so much more.

    Damn. This is crazy idea considering you don't have to trust anybody or any code , I wish for something like zkvm combined with this where with just source code and a proof , you can verify that somebody built it and maybe even distribute it , the problem I suppose is that zkvm doesn't prove things running over the internet ( I think)

  • by antonleviathan on 3/6/25, 12:42 AM

    I'm also one of the maintainers of stagex.

    fwiw, Talos now uses stagex for their builds: https://github.com/siderolabs/talos/releases/tag/v1.10.0-alp...

  • by beebaween on 3/5/25, 7:38 PM

    This is great, but the page still seems to struggle to explain why this is different from nix / why I should use it in the first place?

  • by lrvick on 3/5/25, 11:05 PM

    Hi, I am one of the quorum of maintainers.

    Any questions welcome.

    Feel free to drop by our matrix channel #stagex:matrix.org for feedback or questions any time as well!

  • by max-privatevoid on 3/6/25, 10:22 PM

    Why shoehorn Docker into this as a build sandbox instead of writing an alternative package set for Nix?

  • by d3Xt3r on 3/5/25, 9:00 PM

    I see that they compare themselves against other distros like Alpine and Arch, but the big difference is that you can actually install all those other distros on physical hardware - can you do that with stagex? I don't see any mentions of setting up a bootloader, initramfs, init, display manager etc.

    It's fine if it can't be installed on physical hardware (or if that isn't the intended use), but in which case, I think this point should be clarified.

    To elaborate my use case, I'm interested in using minimal OCI containers as a bootable OS, so when I do an update, I can switch over to the new image (or a different image) in an atomic operation. Yes, I know there are projects like Fedora Atomic, uBlue, bootc etc, but they're all far too bloated - I want to use a minimal, musl-based, fully reproducible image-based updates.