/ # apk update fetch https://packages.wolfi.dev/os/aarch64/APKINDEX.tar.gz [https://packages.wolfi.dev/os] OK: 9494 distinct packages available
We're definitely coming at this from a different angle from Nix, but the approaches are pretty complementary. I'm a big fan of all the work they do.
musl vs. glibc is one of the big departures we make from Alpine though, we use glibc everywhere because of those issues you pointed out.
I opened that apkindex file and it had duplicate entries for a ton of packages with different versions, taking a look at https://github.com/wolfi-dev/os I only see about 840 yaml files which I assume define the packages. I don't think claiming to have 10k packages when only 10% of them are actually different pieces of software is a good claim to make. Nixpkgs would have millions of packages if we added up every single unique package from every revision.
glibc explodes into a few dozen, for example.
Anyway, this is all besides the point I was trying to make which is that I don't see why I should use _yet another_ software distribution that has 1% of the amount of packages found in a mature distribution that already has frequent automatic updates and bleeding-edge software revisions.
You definitely don't need to use Wolfi! But I would say, if you run containers you might want to check out Chainguard Images: https://github.com/chainguard-images/images