The idea behind Dockerfiles is to allow a source repository to be built and packaged automatically, to the exact specification of the upstream developer, regard

The idea behind Dockerfiles is to allow a source repository to be built and packaged automatically, to the exact specification of the upstream developer, regardless of his/her choice of development tools, distro or language. Source repo comes in, container comes out. No other exchange of information necessary. The only dependencies left are 1) the hardware architecture, 2) the kernel and 3) the docker runtime (which is itself a 5MB static binary). This makes things like this potentially possible: $ docker run git://github.com/antirez/redis Voila, you are running Redis - built and configured to the specifications of Salvatore himself.