BRbreakds·Nov 4, 2025
In Pixi: Reproducible Package Management for Roboticslopsided98
nix-ros-overlay
Nix2021–2025
lopsided98 / nix-ros-overlay
nix-ros-overlay
ROS overlay for the Nix package manager
2Distinct people
2Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
438GitHub stars
What to know before exploring
What it is
ROS overlay for the Nix package manager
GitHub
Where it is used
No documented product use has been verified yet.
What people are saying
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Also in these discussions
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This week on Hacker News
Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.
No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.
Mentions over time
HN mentions by year2 dated mentions
Observed mentions: 2021-04-09 13:44:40 UTC to 2025-11-04 03:03:58 UTC.
Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.
View mention counts and date ranges
| Period | Start (UTC) | End (exclusive, UTC) | Mentions | Submissions | Comments |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 2021 | 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
| 2022 | 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2023 | 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2024 | 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 0 | 0 | 0 |
| 2025 | 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC | 1 | 0 | 1 |
What Hacker News says
2 sourcesThanks for the response!
> This is difficult to answer without knowing more details.
The situation specifically is the ROS ecosystem, where metadata is managed in these package.xml files:
https://github.com/ros2/rclcpp/blob/master/rclcpp/package.xm...
The federated nature of the ecosystem has led to a culture where it's very normal to be building dozens of these at once, in the same workspace together, often from multiple repos (the repo above has four in it). So there are several build tools which automate the work of examining a source workspace and building all the packages within it in the correct topological order, in parallel, while respecting build_depend tags. The newest of these tools (colcon) has actually made the package.xml optional in many cases, as it can examine CMakelists, setup.py, BUILD, etc, and discover for itself what
Read the rest
the dependencies are.
Your "distribution" of ROS is formed by listing all the packages and repos in this big file, for which there is other tooling to manage pulling dependency sources, whatever: https://github.com/ros/rosdistro/blob/master/foxy/distributi...
Anyway, so the existing ROS/nix efforts (1) seem to basically consume all of this package/distribution metadata at once and generate a giant parallel structure of nix definitions (eg https://github.com/lopsided98/nix-ros-overlay/blob/master/di...), which I fear would be completely opaque to my users. And any system which required a flag day where everyone leaves behind these existing workflows would be an immediate non-starter.
I think the ideal scenario (and what it would look like if I built this myself based on debs) would be that you could source the "base" workspace as usual (enter the nix-shell?), and check out source, build groups of packages as usual with colcon, but there'd be an extra plugin/verb/flag for it, which would make it build each package as a nix package instead of into the usual installspace. The verb would generate the nix definitions on the fly, and probably handle the invocation and build-parallelism side of it as well.
[1]: https://github.com/acowley/ros2nix, https://github.com/lopsided98/nix-ros-overlay