Comment by Uehreka | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Uehreka | Hacker News Reader

So here's the thing: Docker is the best way we have to document how to set up a project/application in a way that can be repeated on arbitrary computers. The alternative was "have a README where you list all of the things you need to do/install in order to get this project running".

That failed. Miserably.

Developers always assumed things like "well naturally, if you're playing in the XYZ space, you've already got meson installed. What, do you expect me to teach you basic arithmetic in this README too?" Developers across the board, across programming subcultures, showed themselves unable to get past this sort of thing.

So now we have Docker. You may not like it, but this is what peak install guide looks like. An unambiguous file that describes the exact shell steps required to get the piece of software running, starting from a base distro. The developer can't omit any steps or the container won't work on their machine.

It sucks that this Hegelian situation calls for such a draconian solution, but that's where we're at. Developers as a whole can't be trusted to handle this on their own. If you don't have a better solution to this problem, I'm not sure there's much point in complaining.

I think for the development story, we had vagrant in the 2010s which IMO provided a much better experience for developers to set up reproducible dev environments.

Docker excels at bundling up all the dependencies of a piece of software for deployment.

Devcontainers definitely work these days, but I miss vagrant.

I disagree completely. Vagrant worked for your org or your setup but people hardly ever (in my experience) delivered the recipe, or the steps to setup.

Yes, sometimes the vagrant-configure thing had a few lines, but most people shipped an iso with stuff installed. It could have been done, but wasn't being done.

Speaking as someone with similar views to the OP: my “better solution” is to write an idempotent shell script targeting a specific Debian release/ISO that handles system setup end-to-end.

It is for nearly all intents and purposes functionally equivalent to docker, and it’s pretty trivial to port to Dockerfile in minutes. I use docker plenty for work and am fully aware of its benefits. Like the OP, I just dislike Docker’s iptables fuckery and CLI design as a matter of personal preference.

Of course, context is king, and I only do this for things I’m designing and running myself - but the larger point I’m trying to make is that you can do the whole “unambiguous file that describes the exact shell steps required to get the piece of software running, starting from a base distro”-thing without Docker in the picture.

Fully Agree.

Dockerfiles were an excellent way of sysadmins getting developers to write down their build steps.

The fact that they're not deterministic was helped by the fact that we can just copy/paste tarballs around (all a docker image is, is just a pile of tarballs in a tarball after all).

In theory, Nix should be slightly better, but it has too many rough edged for now

I think there is a point to the authors remark on user-friendlyness.

It should be possible to improve the containerization experience by providing a better UI and maybe even a different syntax for docker files.

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