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Comment by chaxor | Hacker News Reader

This is really great.

I have been trying to get my docker to be more distributable. Right now it's just a simple python script in a python env inside a docker container inside a QEMU container to automate a click and then netcat something.

Pretty sweet. It's only like 20GB, so pretty lightweight by modern standards.

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/s this please, people might get some ideas otherwise...

So, someone else mentioned this could be sarcasm, but I've got a real application that could use this. It's a complex multi-domain modeling tool incorporating multiple C binaries, python and julia code. We currently deploy with Docker, but there are too many parameters user could set incorrectly in the Docker Desktop interface. We'd love to ship a static binary of this behemoth to cut down on the user/sysadmin deployment error.

Yeah it was/is a mix of sarcasm and genuine use case. I do have a thing (almost) like this, but use it because I want the isolation of network, filesystem, and so on. I definitely hate that it requires so much (not 20G, but still big) for so little. There's probably a way to do the thing and get a 1Kb binary in some Go with namespaces solution or something, which would be much better, but I don't trust myself to implement it correctly even if I spent the time to learn it. So I'm stuck with a horrible solution of a several GB Debian docker because musl/Alpine doesn't cut it

Oh yeah, we feel this pain point as well re: large and unwieldy containers. The best approach we've been able to come up with is ship a reliable if large container image and slowly factor out or reduce our heaviest and least reliable dependencies. But it's a looooong process.

Debian slim should be around 60mb. Looks like there's something else wrong.

You jest, but python is the poster child for, works on my machine.

Unless you're on Windows 11. You open the console, type "python", for some reason the Windows App Store launches and goes to a "python app". You think to yourself you should probably install Python from the source, so you go to pythons website and download and run the installer, you select "add to path", you run it and it STILL goes to the Windows App Store. So at this point you Google It. You find that you need to use the Windows search bar to find "Manage app execution aliases" and unselect the aliases using python. You then try calling "python" again in CMD, and its not found. You open user environment variables GUI, and find that the PATH was not modified. You again Google "where is python installed" and then you manually append that to PATH and it works. This is the wonderful experience of installing Python in Windows.

Or the PATH was updated, but you forgot that you need to restart your command prompt to refresh the environment variables...

Or you just use the app store version and it all works fine?

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