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COMMENT PAGE FOR:
HTML Pixi: Reproducible Package Management for Robotics
d9i wrote 3 hours 20 min ago:
Wanted to share more love for pixi. Using pixi + docker + dokku for my
data processing projects lets me push an identical environment to a
cloud instance with basically no devops overhead.
roflcopter69 wrote 13 hours 26 min ago:
I know, it's the title of their own post, but making it sound like pixi
is only for robotics is underselling pixi quite heavily.
Pixi is basically uv but for the conda ecosystem in the sense that it
has all the goodness (fast and reliable dependency solver, smart
caching, using hardlinks for environment installs to speed things up
and save space) and makes the whole environment/dependency management
for conda project so much faster and more robust. For dependencies from
PyPI, pixi uses the uv crate under the hood, so it doesn't waste effort
on that front and works just as well.
I think many python project will be fine with just using uv but at
least for my use case, pixi turned out to be just what I needed,
because my software also needs to run on older macOS versions, Intel
and Arm Macs, and packages like OpenCV or PyTorch are just not
officially built for those anymore, but in the conda ecosystem, there
are countless brave souls who build this stuff for macOS 11+ so I can
just use that and it's such a relief.
Uv is getting most of the attention right now and I can totally
understand why, but if python is your main thing and you want to keep
up with what's the best the ecosystem can offer right now, you should
at least give pixi a try and evaluate the pros and cons yourself. It's
really worth it imo.
Balinares wrote 8 hours 8 min ago:
Pixi is such an excellent piece of software. It makes working within
the conda ecosystem tolerable, which is no small feat.
Builds still suck though.
ivaniscoding wrote 16 hours 26 min ago:
I think people have been sleeping on Pixi. There has been a lot of hype
about uv lately and lots of the praise apply to Pixi as well!
Pixi shines in those niches where Conda was the only option. It seems
ROS is one of them.
I have been using Pixi with emscripten-forge to create Python WASM
distributions. Itâs another niche with a lack of tooling. Pixi is the
only tool that streamlined my build process.
Keep up with the good work!
DerThorsten wrote 13 hours 23 min ago:
Always nice to see emscripten-forge users in the wild.
Greetings from the emscripten-forge main author =)
resters wrote 17 hours 15 min ago:
is there by any chance a robot simulator for various kinds of robots so
those who don't actually have hardware can explore software aspects?
v9v wrote 14 hours 50 min ago:
I like Webots because it's easier to get things up and running in it
compared to other simulators.
robotresearcher wrote 15 hours 53 min ago:
Yep. The most popular sim well integrated with ROS is Gazebo, a full
3D sim. Very powerful. Thereâs also the much simpler Stage, limited
to 2.5D mobile robots.
a_t48 wrote 18 hours 17 min ago:
Slightly interested if this makes it easier to install ROS on
not-Ubuntu, or on "unsupported" Ubuntu versions, but I don't really
want to be the one owning the infra behind running the source builds
for ROS2, from my experience so far they're kind of slow. Side by side
ROS1/2 for migration is kind of interesting, too.
baszalmstra wrote 14 hours 51 min ago:
Jep! Pixi works on any linux distribution. The ros packages only
require glibc to be available, the rest is installed by pixi. This
means you can run any ros distro on any version of ubuntu (or any
other glibc based linux for that matter). Including ros1 noetic!
a_t48 wrote 13 hours 8 min ago:
But does it support ros1 bridge?
dima55 wrote 20 hours 36 min ago:
This is the ROS way: add more layers of crap on it until it sorta kinda
works sometimes. If you want "reproducible package management", use
Debian. ROS1 is already in stock Debian. Some of ROS2 is as well. If
you actually want ros to suck less, please package the reset of ROS2,
and push it to Debian.
amacneil wrote 15 hours 22 min ago:
Debian is a terrible dependency management solution for adding
development dependencies to a workspace (e.g. the same sort of thing
npm, cargo, and uv are used for).
As far as I can tell, pixi brings the benefits of these types of
dependencies, with native support for multiple languages (python and
c++ being the big ones).
ROS uses debian packages today (inside a convoluted wrapper), imo it
would be much better if it went all in on pixi instead.
tamimio wrote 20 hours 30 min ago:
Pretty much yeah, I remember I did some work with ROS2 after 1, and
since then I always prefer to build from scratch, cleaner, simpler,
and in many cases far better results too.
forgetbook wrote 18 hours 27 min ago:
Any thoughts on Nix for this?
tamimio wrote 12 hours 9 min ago:
Sometimes (probably most times) you donât have the privilege of
choosing the OS, for example, if you have to use a Jetson SBC you
will mostly use the default ubuntu so you can utilize the nvidia
drivers for the cuda cores.
a_t48 wrote 3 hours 44 min ago:
There's NixOS for Jetson, fwiw
breakds wrote 17 hours 56 min ago:
HTML [1]: https://github.com/lopsided98/nix-ros-overlay
dima55 wrote 18 hours 21 min ago:
The packaging is only one of ROS's numerous issues. Just do it
yourself.
DIR <- back to front page