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Comment by ridruejo | Hacker News Reader

Once you do anything interesting (i.e. install Python) then Alpine and minideb size are basically identical

I guess it's a bit more specific than you meant it, but our standard Python image is ~20MB (alpine + python3, basically); that's still under half of minideb.

Does look interesting for things that need glibc compatibility though. There are some packages to help with that in Alpine but they only go so far.

Thanks, this is where I got the data from:

https://dzone.com/articles/minideb-a-minimalist-debian-based...

From looking at what I think is the Dockerfile for that image (https://github.com/docker-library/python/blob/b1512ead24c6b1...), that image is complex; it's downloading & building Python in it and adding & removing a dev toolchain, in a few different layers.

I'm not surprised that I got something a lot smaller from just running `apk add python3.6`, although as a result they are not comparing apples to apples; their minideb example does pretty much exactly the equivalent (i.e. downloading the distro-provided package, not compiling it within their image).

Yep. I like alpine and use it for my images for preference, but some things like getting Ruby on Rails working with therubyracer can bascially hit a wall in alpine, so this could be pretty handy.

In my experience python in alpine is is sometimes 2x slower. How does ruby perform under Alpine?

On the other hand if you don't need Python because it's a container running a service like Redis or Nginx you can keep entire Alpine-based image around 25-50% of the size or bare minideb image.

I know old school native code is looked down upon these days, but there are people that write code without bloated runtime dependencies.

You don’t need to add python “to do anything interesting.”

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