guix

I also have high hopes for Guix, and in fact there is a gsoc project to port Guix to the Hurd.

Nix and Guix manage the stateless, deterministic stuff, and system services or other mechanisms manage the stateful stuff.

The technology for regenerating exact Docker containers exists in the form of GNU Guix and/or Nix packages.

You can actually use Guix to export the closure of the build and distribute that, if that's your thing.

Does Guix help with the building of reproducible binaries, or is it focused on reproducible build environments/config?

I understand what parent means, and I think it's fair, but comparing Docker and Guix is weird, because they aren't really competing technologies.

Nix isn't hacky and Guix is even less so, as opposed to Docker.

I've been writing my own container implementation for the GNU Guix project and your code has been a wonderful reference.

We do this for Guix itself to greatly simplify the installation process for new users, though for your use-case there would be some adjustment needed.

Any Hurd or Guix devs in here to comment on this?

I recommend exploring what GNU Guix and Nix do to solve the dependency isolation problem without introducing the harmful side-effects of bundling.

I work on the GNU Guix project, which can do all of these things.

You can't tell them "install Guix, learn how to use it, then use Guix to install my app".

Luckily, the Nix and GNU Guix projects solve this problem very well, if only they could get some more "mindshare."

With a bunch more elbow grease and polish, the nix/guix approach allows us to have the best of both worlds, but this is a very new development; arguably it isn't even "there" yet.

So it's hard to say, what is the difference between Docker and Nix/Guix because they serve different purposes, but if you compare configuration language, "the approach" - you don't have to think twice to decide which is better.

See GNU Guix, Nix, and Debian's Reproducible Builds project for efforts to make build truly reproducible.

The fun fact is that when using GNU Guix, Docker itself is no longer required.

Nix/Guix do not interact with such files, and we make it a point to differentiate between stateful and stateless.