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Re: Follow up on last night's discussion on docker

  • Subject: Re: Follow up on last night's discussion on docker
  • From: Ron <ron [ at ] bclug [ dot ] ca>
  • Date: Fri, 3 Oct 2025 09:02:01 -0700
Tug Williams via linux wrote on 2025-10-03 07:57:

So, is it fair to say that the need for docker / containers, is because the dependency problem in Linux is insurmountable?

I suppose that's one way to look at it.

If I wrote and maintain $software, I don't want to field bug reports from Hentai69Girls420LOL distro's users because that distro has done something weird in their repos.

Nor do I wish to hear from users of decade-old Debian who've hacked their system to get my software to run, but not well enough to run stably.

And it's not because I'm "too lazy to do the work to get it to run on various Linux distros", TYVM. I develop software, I use $distro, I don't want to run eleventeen different distros to make sure they don't break something. Because I test eleventeen successfully and eleventeen+1 breaks...



By releasing as a Docker / Flatpak / Snap, I can be sure that "works on my system" should be nearly universally true.


Are containers are just a temporary solution - dare I say, a tourniquet - that will lead to the demise of Linux as a coherent collection of independent projects?

I get the sense that it's not a demise but a strength: more stability across more systems at the cost of some duplication of libraries. Which is generally acceptable because storage is cheap.


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