Correct, fully agreed with what you said about syslog. But that's not the problem that baseimage-docker is trying to solve. Suppose that you're building a Docke

Correct, fully agreed with what you said about syslog. But that's not the problem that baseimage-docker is trying to solve. Suppose that you're building a Docker container, and something fails. Nothing on stdout and stderr. You decide to look in /var/log/syslog, but nothing there too. You scratch your head. If only you knew that /var/log/syslog only works if the syslog daemon is running. That sort of thing is what baseimage-docker solves. Whether you want to ship logs outside the container, that's up to you. Right now I am building a web app in a Docker container. The web app is written in Rails, hosted by Nginx and Phusion Passenger. To make setup as easy as possible for users, the container also contains PostgreSQL. I run Nginx+Passenger and PostgreSQL at the same time by hooking them both on runit. The init system in baseimage-docker ensures that a 'docker stop' properly shuts down both Nginx and PostgreSQL.