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It was meant as genuine constructive criticism and a plea to do better. They have more traction than most people to morph docker into something that comes close
by drewm1980 5y ago
It was meant as genuine constructive criticism and a plea to do better. They have more traction than most people to morph docker into something that comes close to its predecessors in efficiency. Somehow replace their fragile layer caching strategy based around diffs of the entire filesystem, with something that understands the OS and language-specific packaging systems being used inside the containers, and can therefore at ~least cache the package downloads. We desperately need a better, more efficient package manager, and Docker has been a huge setback; it has become normal for CICD to rebuild your image every time you touch the code, and pull down practically an entire linux distribution every time. I know you can do better with docker caching if you put in enough consistent and dedicated engineering effort into how you structure things, and set up local apt and pypi mirrors, etc... but that's the default behavior, and none of (admittedly very small number organizations) I've worked at have had the organizational capacity to really get past it. I don't know if we need what they're building, but we absolutely need a much more efficient new version of Docker with an easy migration path. Indeed they may be the ~only people with traction to resolve this, since in the current climate as soon as someone introduces a new package manager with more efficient dependency resolution or caching (i.e. nix, poetry, cargo...), people just stick it in their Docker container and break the caching anyway.