I think this is really cool. We're tackling this problem from the other side by building `pixi` (pixi.sh) which bundles project / package management with a task runner so that any CI should be as simple as `pixi run test` and easy to execute locally or in the cloud.
My team has a setup that sounds essentially the same using Nix via devenv.sh. We deterministically bundle and run everything from OpenTofu and all its providers to our programming languages runtimes to our pre-commit hooks this way, and it also features a task runner that builds a dependency graph and runs things in parallel and so on.
Our commands for CI are all just one liners that go to wrappers than pin all our dependencies.
Lately I've been working with a lot of cross-platform Bash scripts that run natively on macOS, WSL, and Linux servers, with little to no consideration for the differences. It's been good!
that’s not really what’s new or special about pixi, is it? poetry (poethepoet) and uv can both do variations of this.
From the outside, pixi looks like a way to replace (conda + pip) with (not-conda + uv). It’s like uv-for-conda, but also uses uv internally.
Better task running is cool, but it would be odd to use pixi if you don’t otherwise need conda stuff. And extra super duper weird if you don’t have any python code!
