Comment by markbnj | Hacker News Reader

Comment by markbnj | Hacker News Reader

Ok, I get it. I've felt like writing this article many times. I didn't, but I give the author props for letting off some steam in a constructive way. However... this statement drove me a little bonkers...

>> The 30-minute claim came because the software only officially supports being installed via Docker, the shiny new container gizmo that everyone loves because it’s shiny and new, which already set off some red flags. I managed to install an entire interoperating desktop environment without needing Docker for any of it, but a web forum is so complex that it needs its own quasivirtualized OS? Hmm.

I understand the reflexive dismissal of things that become popular topics. I'm guilty of it myself repeatedly, most recently with "microservices." But sometimes technologies become popular because they are good and useful.

I haven't run into Docker's 32-bit install problem. They should fix that. But to dismiss the whole technology as some sort of obviously useless quasi-virtualized OS mumbo jumbo is taking the rant too far. Dependency isolation is a good thing. Deploying server applications with one command is a good thing. Knowing that your runtime environment is always the same is a good thing. Having a simple source controlled script that completely describes that runtime environment is a good thing. Some people try to use containers for unreasonably complicated things, or to hide unreasonably complicated software, but that is not an indictment of the technology. It's popular for a reason.

As a happy Docker user with a lot of respect for what Docker has achieved, what concerns me is that Docker is clearly an enabler for people to totally abandon proper release and dependency management along with sane sysadmin friendly configuration.

I can't tell you the number of times I've hoped to use a public docker image or just the Dockerfile, only to spend hours futzing with it because I was unhappy with the grotesquely insecure configuration or because I needed to work around a bunch of assumptions that are invalid once I've tuned the Dockerfile for my environment.

Fix the insecurities upstream or dont use the software. Else upgrades will be a nightmare too.

I agree, and I do (if I end up actually keeping a piece of software running).

It's also quite likely that a pre-built docker image isn't going to satisfy everyone's deployment requirements.

Starting out with a philosophy that you'll make all the configuration and security choices for every user of your project isn't a great start, and that's how I read all these hard-coded assumptions.

Also, the author's explicitly makes the assumption that Docker is only appropriate once an application surpasses a certain level of complexity. I don't think that's a very good assumption. I think that it's perfectly reasonable for any open source web app with any dependencies to support or even encourage development and installation via Docker. I don't see why the choice to use Docker has any relevance to the complexity of the application.

The operative word is needs, since Docker is the only supported way to install this particular software. Which is, I cannot stress enough, a forum.

Sorry, I just can't buy into the dripping sarcasm of emphasizing that it's only a forum. Yeah, it's a forum. Forums are big software applications. It's not unreasonable to distribute the forum backend with Docker.

It's only the most advanced, most thought-out web forum. It's leaps and bounds ahead of phpbb and Invision because the lead developer knows that details matter. That includes testing, automatic updates, spam protection, user experience, and all that stuff that old PHP boards suck at.

Agreed in general, but I'm not so sure Docker should be expected to support installing a complex container manager into a 32-bit userspace on a 64-bit OS. They've done a lot of good work (doing the things that you've called out above), and I personally think it's fine to say that the tool is mostly for the kind of commodity just-imaged OS that typically runs in the cloud. Putting Docker on a snowflake server doesn't seem like a great idea even if it works.

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