The gophers are https://podman.io/ which builds and runs containers.
My guess is they are building the same application in multiple distros for their one application
Like
my-app-nix
my-app-fedora
my-app-alpine
It's a common practice so users can choose the distro they prefer when launching your container in their stack.
In this case, it's not my program, it's an open-source project I'm trying to compile, and I actually can't get the program to compile on any of these distros.
I tried nix-shell at first, then I tried launching containers of Debian and Fedora, which have official build instructions, and yeah, nothing has truly worked so far.
I do have a working setup on openSUSE, but it involves half-compiling it in nix-shell and then compiling the rest with whatever magical combination of openSUSE packages I have on there. This setup also happens to be on my old laptop...