5 ms·
You're missing the point, which isn't that "badly-maintained software" and "technical debt" are the problems. It's that I, as a developer who writes Python whic
by evol262 12y ago
You're missing the point, which isn't that "badly-maintained software" and "technical debt" are the problems. It's that I, as a developer who writes Python which runs on Fedora, EL[6|7], Gentoo, Debian, Ubuntu, and Arch have to go through an inordinate amount of testing and hoop-jumping in order to make sure that my application runs on EL6 and Fedora, to say nothing of systems which aren't guaranteed to have the same package names, library locations, or major versions of Python, much less having it at all (especially a problem on EL6 and Gentoo).
It makes sense for me, as a developer, not to go through repackaging and retesting for 7 distros with 4 different packaging paradigms and 3 init systems when I could simply tell you to run a container. None.
Disk space and memory are now cheap. Statically linked binaries are coming back. Containers as the new /opt strike a middle ground between distro portability and developer effort. It must be nice for you to live in an ivory tower.
- prodigal_erik 12y agoIf you're throwing proprietary binaries over the wall for clients who aren't paying enough to support all their platforms, I guess picking one is a necessary evil. But it seems strange to set up a container, which is essentially your own custom distro which nobody else uses, rather than just picking a well-supported distro. And if I had a goal of minimizing any interaction between my code and its environment, Linux syscalls are a much bigger API than I would choose. It's not as if you can claim to support a distro whose kernel or docker version you haven't tested on.