Agreed to an extent. Even outside RHEL, you have yum for RPM-based distros, Aptitude for deb-based distros, pacman for Arch, etc. You need to start with the sa

Agreed to an extent. Even outside RHEL, you have yum for RPM-based distros, Aptitude for deb-based distros, pacman for Arch, etc. You need to start with the same base operating system, and you need to make sure that you pull in the same versions of packages in case there are backwards-incompatible bugs, or version bumps such that the dynamically-loaded library is no longer detected (hence the common albeit dangerous workaround of "add a symlink"). (If you're using rpm directly, then you need to bundle the actual packages that you're installing, or point to specific packages that you're confident won't change. And at that point, what's the difference between your approach and Docker?) The challenge that I believe Docker solves (or, at least, attempts to) is environment reproducibility: without it, you have dependency hell.