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Alpine Linux 3.14.0 Released

64 points by pella 5y ago

qwertox 5y ago
In my case Alpine is really great for containers, I've been using it for a couple of years now, primarily to run Python in it. With regards to that, the lack of wheels, sometimes outdated or suddenly missing libraries and some incompatibilities with musl do create annoying scenarios where one has to find a way to repair things for many hours. I had a container with nginx in it, running on a Raspberry Pi 3 with a 32 bit OS (therefore using Alpine 32 bit in the container), and when upgrading to 3.13.0 suddenly the timestamps in the logs were wrong. I can't remember how I noticed it, maybe some other things were also off a bit. It turned out that time_t got changed to calling time64-compatible system calls. This basically broke Alpine >= 3.13.0 for 32 bit. I don't know if there will be a solution for this, but for me this meant that I will use Alpine only in very specific scenarios. I'm now migrating a lot of my containers to use Debian Slim, also because of the ability to use wheels, which dramatically improves build times. But don't get me wrong, Alpine is an awesome OS, and I will continue to use it for nginx (64 bit), RabbitMQ, ejabberd and stuff like that, as well as Python apps which are proven to run on it. So I'm excited to try this new version, and congratulations to the team creating it!
- dagw 5y ago
  I started using Alpine when I first discovered Docker, but now mostly use Debian Slim largely due to the reasons you outlined. Given the problems with Alpine and how you cannot rely on it to work in all cases, what are the advantages Alpine offer that makes it worth using over a more 'normal' Debian or Ubuntu based image?
- scns 5y ago
  Using Alpine for Python containers: Makes your build slower: https://pythonspeed.com/articles/alpine-docker-python/ https://pythonspeed.com/articles/alpine-docker-python/ There are more performant base images: https://pythonspeed.com/articles/faster-python/ https://pythonspeed.com/articles/faster-python/ https://pythonspeed.com/articles/base-image-python-docker-images/ https://pythonspeed.com/articles/base-image-python-docker-im... disclaimer: not affiliated [edit: add disclaimer]
zibzab 5y ago
Is there a recent comparison between Alpine, Debian slim and Ubuntu core? Preferably with some complex software installed?

64 points by pella 5y ago

In my case Alpine is really great for containers, I've been using it for a couple of years now, primarily to run Python in it. With regards to that, the lack of wheels, sometimes outdated or suddenly missing libraries and some incompatibilities with musl do create annoying scenarios where one has to find a way to repair things for many hours. I had a container with nginx in it, running on a Raspberry Pi 3 with a 32 bit OS (therefore using Alpine 32 bit in the container), and when upgrading to 3.13.0 suddenly the timestamps in the logs were wrong. I can't remember how I noticed it, maybe some other things were also off a bit. It turned out that time_t got changed to calling time64-compatible system calls. This basically broke Alpine >= 3.13.0 for 32 bit. I don't know if there will be a solution for this, but for me this meant that I will use Alpine only in very specific scenarios. I'm now migrating a lot of my containers to use Debian Slim, also because of the ability to use wheels, which dramatically improves build times. But don't get me wrong, Alpine is an awesome OS, and I will continue to use it for nginx (64 bit), RabbitMQ, ejabberd and stuff like that, as well as Python apps which are proven to run on it. So I'm excited to try this new version, and congratulations to the team creating it!

dagw 5y ago
I started using Alpine when I first discovered Docker, but now mostly use Debian Slim largely due to the reasons you outlined. Given the problems with Alpine and how you cannot rely on it to work in all cases, what are the advantages Alpine offer that makes it worth using over a more 'normal' Debian or Ubuntu based image?
scns 5y ago
Using Alpine for Python containers: Makes your build slower: https://pythonspeed.com/articles/alpine-docker-python/ https://pythonspeed.com/articles/alpine-docker-python/ There are more performant base images: https://pythonspeed.com/articles/faster-python/ https://pythonspeed.com/articles/faster-python/ https://pythonspeed.com/articles/base-image-python-docker-images/ https://pythonspeed.com/articles/base-image-python-docker-im... disclaimer: not affiliated [edit: add disclaimer]

zibzab 5y ago

Is there a recent comparison between Alpine, Debian slim and Ubuntu core? Preferably with some complex software installed?