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Comment by LinXitoW | Hacker News Reader

It's not just mildly annoying, it completely ruins a great thing.

Docker Compose is to stacks what Dockerfiles are to a single application. Podmans solution is to not commit to compose, but instead to create a bespoke mechanism involving a bunch of tiny files, all of which is insanely system (linux) specific, and therefore completely non-portable.

I genuinely don't understand how someone can see the value of Docker, but then do things so completely "not-docker" when it comes to deployment/stacks/orchestration.

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> but instead to create a bespoke mechanism involving a bunch of tiny files, all of which is insanely system (linux) specific, and therefore completely non-portable.

To nit pick slightly, it's not really a bespoke mechanism it's just re-using the mechanisms provided by systemd. Quadlets are implemented as a systemd generator in order to re-use the existing service management system that exists on essentially all major Linux distros. Quadlets are less a direct competitor with compose (hence why Podman implements the compose spec) and more a way to better integrate containers with the rest of a system. The closer Podman native equivalent to compose is Kube files.

Depends on your point of view.

It can be argued that it’s Docker that is reinventing the wheel and doing its own bespoke process management, journal management etc when all of these are solved problems on Linux. Podman is instead reusing the platform which exists, Quadlets are just reusing systemd, so as a sysadmin I can manage, control and monitor docker containers using the same standard tooling that I already use to manage, control and monitor all the other processes which are running on the system.

Architecturally I find the above argument attractive. The problem is chronology. Docker and docker compose came before systems was ubiquitous and long before Quadlets, so it’s natural to think of Quadlets as reinventing the wheel.

Personally I wish docker had not rejected composition/integration around systemd. Would have made everyone’s job a lot easier in the long term.

> Personally I wish docker had not rejected composition/integration around systemd. Would have made everyone’s job a lot easier in the long term.

It also would have only run on Linux hosts (and not all of those at that), so something else would have been adopted instead. Docker didn't win by being superior to every alternative, it won by being good enough and being everywhere. For portable orchestration, Desktop does ship with kubernetes that's literally one click to enable.

> Docker Compose is to stacks what Dockerfiles are to a single application. Podmans solution is to not commit to compose

This isn't (completely) true. I found podman-compose to be a more or less drop-in replacement for docker-compose. I know that in the past support was patchy, but things are rather good now.

Pretty sure that's because podman-compose literally calls docker-compose under the hood.

e: from the manpage:

"podman compose is a thin wrapper around an external compose provider such as docker-compose or podman-compose. This means that podman compose is executing another tool that implements the compose functionality but sets up the environment in a way to let the compose provider communicate transparently with the local Podman socket. The specified options as well as the command and argument are passed directly to the compose provider."

That's the "podman compose" wrapper command. podman-compose (the implementation referenced in the first sentence of your quote) does not call docker-compose: https://github.com/containers/podman-compose

it calls podman-compose or docker-compose depending on what is installed...

this is literally what manpage you quoted says too

FWIW, for me docker compose works just fine with podman. I am not sure what kind of additional configuration is needed these days, make sure you are running podman with the socket thing and perhaps set DOCKER_HOST. It's just a client / frontend to an API that podman provides.

IIRC `podman compose` can invoke either `podman-compose` or `docker-compose` and sets up the environment for the call, so I don't think you need to even really do anything special other than install either of the 2 commands

The purpose of quadlets is when you want good integration with systemd.

The better equivalent of docker compose is podman kube, which does use a single file. And it isn't bespoke, it uses the same format as kunernetes.

And if you prefer the docker compose format, podman-compose is available as a separate tool.

And FWIW docker compose is a separate tool from docker itself as well (and needs to be installed separately on several linux distros). And can actually work with podman instead of docker.

Have you try podman-compose ?

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