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Comment by lkrubner | Hacker News Reader

And yet, when I criticized Docker in 2018, in an article much discussed here on Hacker News, many of the comments pointed out how much something like PHP would benefit.

raziel2p wrote:

"However, I think the author trivializes the amount of work required to make different types of Python/PHP/NodeJS/whatever apps all work in a consistent way through configuration management, saying "I can just write a bash script or makefile." or "just download roles from Ansible Galaxy". This is so painfully ignorant and irresponsible that I fail to take the article seriously as a whole."

From here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17062288

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If a person says that thing X is easy for them in their context, default to believing them.

If a person says that thing X is hard for them in their context, default to believing them.

There is no contradiction there.

This reads as: "believe whatever people say because we're afraid to contradict them."

If you find yourself assuming someone else is motivated by fear, first ask yourself if they might be motivated by truth-seeking.

I recommend applying Bayes Rule:

If someone says they were abducted by aliens, first think about how likely that is to have happened. Then account for the probability that someone who says that it happened is confused or lying about that situation. Then maybe ask a clarifying question.

If someone says they were frustrated and confused by python packaging, first think about how likely that is to have happened. Then account for the probability that someone who says that it happened is confused or lying about that situation. Then maybe ask a clarifying question.

——————————

Personally, I think it is much more common for people to be confused about configuring and packaging software than it is for people to be totally clear yet also confused about whether or not they are confused.

Sounds like I hit the nail on the head.

It sounds like there is a misunderstanding.

I can see both sides. If your PHP app depends on non-core modules, or resources that might clash with more than one instance running (apcu comes to mind, or redis), or a complex database layer, etc...maybe docker would help.

Quite correct, both sides are clearly visible and there might be some point to using containers anyway.

But there's a bigger issue here. The comments the OP received, are heavily worded to the point that they explicitly state that the article made them angry.

Regardless of whether containers are suitable or not for task X or Y, it is very difficult to have a normal conversation, if one's comments can actually make people angry.

It's almost as if tyingq and raziel2p are two different individuals with their own unique viewpoints and opinions... It's not a knock on you - it's just that I never understood comments like this.

We had some software break earlier this week because our Ansible role installs Python 3.8.10 as `python` but the system had 3.8.6 installed as `python3`. This meant that when we ran `/usr/bin/env python` it used the non-system python which wasn't picking up packages from /usr/lib/python3.8/dist-packages or wherever Ubuntu packages are installed.

The default `pip` and `pip3` commands, however, used the system python and did read those directories, meaning that it kept insisting the given package was installed. It was a frustrating amount of digging around that could have been avoided in myriad ways, one of which being containers (though for a 30-line python script, docker seems like overkill).

To avoid this problem I use virtualenv for each project _and_ I point to the pip binary inside that env (env/bin/pip or env/bin/python) in my ansible scripts or any other commands. I settled on this after running into similar problems

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