My declarative distrobox approach

[alexpdp7]

Hi all,

I read https://www.ypsidanger.com/declaring-your-own-personal-distroboxes/ with great interest, because I have been doing a similar thing lately.

https://github.com/alexpdp7/alexpdp7/blob/master/workstation/build_workstation

I have a script that given a list of Arch packages and AUR packages, builds a container image. I have that wired with GH Actions to build that on every commit and push the built image to quay.io.

I think Arch has the most sprawling packages if one includes the AUR (the other option would be Nix, but building Nix containers looks complex), so I think it makes sense to use it for the purpose of building Toolbox-like containers. I like this quasi-declarative approach, because it's simpler for users; with some work, the list of packages could be a config file that could be maintained by tools.

By digging around the UBlue community, I've learned about paru, which seems to solve the main problem I'm facing right now- dependencies between AUR packages, so I should investigate that at some point.

Just wanting to share my approach- I hope it is useful to someone.

Cheers,

Álex