Comment by forrestthewoods
18 hours ago
> So... are you arguing that we do need to ship everything vendored in so that it can't be updated,
I’m arguing that the prevalence of Docker is strong evidence that the “Linux model” has fundamentally failed.
Many people disagree with that claim and think that TheLinuxModel is good actually. However I point that these people almost definitely make extensive use of Docker. And that Docker (or similar) are actually necessary to reliably run programs on Linux because TheLinuxModel is so bad and has failed so badly.
If you believe in TheLinuxModel and also do not use Docker to deploy your software then you are, in the year 2025, a very rare outlier.
Personally, I am very pro ShipYourFuckingDependencies. But I also dont think that deploying a program should be much more complicated than sharing an uncompressed zip file. Docker adds a lot of crusting. Packaging images/zips/deployments should be near instantaneous.
> I’m arguing that the prevalence of Docker is strong evidence that the “Linux model” has fundamentally failed.
That is a very silly argument considering that Docker is built on primitives that Linux exposes. All Docker does is make them accessible via a friendly UI, and adds some nice abstractions on top such as images.
It's also silly because there is no single "Linux model". There are many different ways of running applications on Linux, depending on the environment, security requirements, user preference, and so on. The user is free to simply compile software on their own if they wish. This versatility is a strength, not a weakness.
Your argument seems to be against package managers as a whole, so I'm not sure why you're attacking Linux. There are many ecosystems where dependencies are not vendored and a package manager is useful, viceversa, or even both.
There are very few objectively bad design decisions in computing. They're mostly tradeoffs. Choosing a package manager vs vendoring is one such scenario. So we can argue endlessly about it, or we can save ourselves some time and agree that both approaches have their merits and detriments.
> That is a very silly argument considering that Docker is built on primitives that Linux exposes
No.
I am specifically talking about the Linuxism where systems have a global pool of shared libraries in one of several common locations (that ever so slightly differs across distros because fuck you).
Windows and macOS don’t do this. I don’t pollute system32 with a kajillion random ass DLLs. A Windows PATH is relatively clean from random shit. (Less so when Linux-first software is involved). Stuffing a million libraries into /usr/lib or other PATH locations is a Linuxism. I think this Linuxism is bad. And that it’s so bad everyone now has to use Docker just to reliably run a computer program.
Package managers for software libraries to compile programs is a different scenario I’ve not talked about in this thread. Although since you’ve got me ranting the Linuxisms that GCC and Clang follow are also fucking terrible. Linking against the random ass version of glibc on the system is fucking awful software engineering. This is why people also make Docker images of their build environment! Womp womp sad trombone everyone is fired.
I don’t blame Linux for making bad decisions. It was the 80s and no one knew better. But it is indeed an extremely bad set of design decisions. We all live with historical artifacts and cruft. Not everything is a trade off.
> I am specifically talking about the Linuxism where systems have a global pool of shared libraries in one of several common locations (that ever so slightly differs across distros because fuck you).
> Windows and macOS don’t do this.
macOS does in fact have a /usr/lib. It's treated as not to be touched by third parties, but there's always a /usr/local/lib and similar for distributing software that's not bundled with macOS just like on any other Unix operating system. The problem you're naming is just as relevant to FreeBSD Ports as it is to Debian.
And regardless, it's not a commitment Nix shares, and its problems are not problems Nix suffers from. It's not at all inherent to package management, including on Linux. See Nix, Guix, and Spack, for significant, general-purpose, working examples that don't fundamentally rely on abstractions like containers for deployment.
I totally agree with this, though, and so does everyone who's into Nix:
> Stuffing a million libraries into /usr/lib [...] is bad.
> I don’t blame Linux for making bad decisions. It was the 80s and no one knew better. But it is indeed an extremely bad set of design decisions. We all live with historical artifacts and cruft. Not everything is a trade off.
> Windows and macOS don’t do this. I don’t pollute system32 with a kajillion random ass DLLs.
You can't be serious. Are you not familiar with the phrase "DLL hell"? Windows applications do indeed put and depend on random ass DLLs in system32 to this day. Install any game, and it will dump random DLLs all over the system. Want to run an app built with Visual C++, or which depends on C++ libraries? Good luck tracking down whatever version of the MSVC runtime you need to install...
Microsoft and the community realized this is a problem, which is why most Windows apps are now deployed via Chocolatey, Scoop, WinGet, or the MS Store.
So, again, your argument is nonsensical when focused on Linux. If anything, Linux does this better than other operating systems since it gives the user the choice of how they want to manage applications. You're not obligated to use any specific package manager.
3 replies →
> Many people disagree with that claim and think that TheLinuxModel is good actually. However I point that these people almost definitely make extensive use of Docker
You've got the wrong audience here. Nix people are neither big fans of "the Linux model" (because Nix is founded in part on a critique of the FHS, a core part and source of major problems with "the Linux model") nor rely heavily on Docker to ship dependencies. But if by "the Linux model" you just mean not promising a stable kernel ABI, pulling an OS together from disparate open-source projects, and key libraries not promising eternal API stability, it might have some relevance to Nixers...
> I also dont think that deploying a program should be much more complicated than sharing an uncompressed zip file. Docker adds a lot of crusting. Packaging images/zips/deployments should be near instantaneous.
Your sense of "packaging" conflates two different things. One aspect of packaging is specifying dependencies and how software gets built in the first place in a very general way. This is the hard part of packaging for cohesive software distributions such as have package managers. (This is generally not really done on platforms like Windows, at least not in a unified or easily interrogable format.) This is what an RPM spec does, what the definition of a Nix package does, etc.
The other part is getting built artifacts, in whatever format you have them, into a deployable format. I would call this something like "packing" (like packing an archive) rather than "packaging" (which involves writing some kind of code specifying dependencies and build steps).
If you've done the first step well— by, for instance, writing and building a Nix package— the second step is indeed trivial and "damn near instantaneous". This is true whether you're deploying with `nix-copy-closure`/`nix copy`, which literally just copy files[1][2], or creating a Docker image, where you can just stream the same files to an archive in seconds[3].
And the same packaging model which enables hermetic deployments, like Docker but without requiring the use of containers at all, does still allow keeping only a single copy of common dependencies and patching them in place.[4]
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1: https://nix.dev/manual/nix/2.30/command-ref/nix-copy-closure...
2: https://nix.dev/manual/nix/2.30/command-ref/new-cli/nix3-cop...
3: https://github.com/nlewo/nix2container
4: https://guix.gnu.org/blog/2020/grafts-continued/