Integrate with bob

[blaggacao]

https://github.com/benchkram/bob

[jmgilman]

A few things to note:

• The audience of bob seems to be non-nix users who want the reproducibility of nix without having to write anything themselves.
• Asking the maintainers to consider native nix-integration is likely to conflict with the above.
• The YAML format of bob adds an unnecessary level of indirection. An alternative is unlikely to be gained (see the above two points).
• Bob doesn't actually build anything per se. The same functionality it offers can be achieved internally with runnables - with the only exception being handling dependencies.

Philosophically, I think we might be at odds with what bob is doing, so this friction might make integration harder than some other potential tools out there.

[blaggacao]

I think your points are all very valid.

I'd have hoped that the integration would be somewhat easier.

When I was creating a branch for this last week that marked the start of a more detailed thought process, I realized that we also can have the desired on-ramp in a different format.

What we want:

• a DAG runner that has an excellent UX
• a possibility to write stuff naively in yaml and already onboaring into reproducability (while also gradually adopting Nix for derivations and config)

The biggest discrete jump is going from:

go build ...
go test ...

To:

mkDerivation { /* ... */ }

But this is also the red pill.

[blaggacao]

For the time being, this has been superseded and aproximated further by #118.

That doesn't implement a DAG. But it does implement some degree of graduality in onboarding from a more familiar interface (here: Justfile/Makefile, there: yaml).

It also opens a relatively straight forward migration path to "lift up" Justfile definitions "into the Nix", by satisfying the nascent (still just a collateral of #119) Standard "task" interface.