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Comment by cycloptic | Hacker News Reader

You are comparing having containers versus having no containers and no kind of bundling at all, which is not a reasonable comparison. If you need an OS snapshot, the only option on other operating systems is often to use a VM. That's what containers are used as an alternative to. (The other alternative there is to never install patches or upgrades on the production machines, which probably creates as many problems as using containers)

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I’m not sure I made that comparison. I’m saying the popularity of containers is an existence proof that the distro-oriented shared library system is failing to meet the needs of common use cases.

Programs that bundle dependencies have a radically reduced need for snapshots, VMs, or containers. Such tools do provide a variety of value. But they don’t become virtually requirements to merely launch a program without error.

Ship your damn dependencies says I. Either statically or dynamically, but ship them.

You can't get rid of the distro-oriented shared library system, it exists as long as you are building on top of an operating system. To that end, when you say "we depend on operating system minimum version X.Y.Z" that now becomes another dependency you have to ship at some point if you're running the production machines. Containers are popular because they actually solve that exact problem. If there was some other comparison you were making I'd be interested to hear it, but AFAIK containers can only help here so it's not clear what else you were comparing to.

Parent is saying that the distribution model of modern distros is so legacy and out of alignment with what people actually want that a solution involving bundling the entire damn OS to sidestep that pit of snakes has now became the defacto way to deploy software.

To put it another way, what do you think the relative popularity of distributing your own internal software via a private apt repo is compared to bundling it as a stateless container and putting it on a registry? Some big companies that pre-date containers do it with apt. Most don’t. For good reason.

The company I work at has an internal yum repository that we use for application and certain application dependenices. It's worked reasonably well for us, mainly because we stick with using dependencies provided through the internal or public yum repositories or some other public external yum repositories if a particular dependency is not available otherwise.

I'm sure a similar solution could also work with apt.

For an entire OS, this doesn't make sense. It does make sense for business critical software. We did this 20 years ago, even calling the subdir VENDOR, for some 3rd party components. It's part of design, and even support of your stuff.

What's new is containers and k8s. People will put more into that, for dev and critical sw.

However, for full desktop or OS it's probably cargo-cult or hard to scale and maintain.

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