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Comment by drdaeman | Hacker News Reader

It's a pity Docker is still not using multi-arch official images, despite all the tech (manifest lists) is already here and seems to be working. One still has use e.g. "FROM arm32v7/alpine" instead of "FROM alpine".

Without this, non-x86_64 use is somewhat painful, as one has to edit every single Dockerfile just so images can be built.

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You're right and I suspect it's because multi-arch isn't a business priority. The support for multi-arch is there and things are slowly moving in that direction. I'm more optimistic now than I was 2 years ago.

Actually Docker EE has multi-arch as a selling point[1] with support for Windows and Linux on x86 and Linux on IBM Z (s390). These three options require different Docker images, so it would make sense for them to figure out a way to indicate image architecture sooner rather than later.

1: https://blog.docker.com/2017/08/docker-enterprise-edition-17...

You're assuming they don't want to keep it out as a differentiator.

I don't think there's additional multi-arch support in EE which is not present in CE. When I say support here I mean in terms of there being a complete suite of official multi-arch images. I believe the points in this article are still relevant - https://blog.alexellis.io/5-things-docker-rpi/

You can use variables in the FROM statement (recent docker versions).

I can even use manifest lists and have the same FROM for different archs: http://container-solutions.com/multi-arch-docker-images/ - that's what I meant saying that it's here. Just that it isn't advertised.

The problem is, Docker official images (e.g. alpine, ubuntu, debian, python, node, etc) don't do this, so every Dockerfile that uses those as a base needs to be edited by hand, and you have to trust someone for unofficial base images (or build and maintain them on your own).

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