Comment by IshKebab

4 months ago

Right but those things are not unrelated. Back in the day if you suggested to the average FOSS developer that maybe it should just be possible to download a zip of binaries, unzip it anywhere and run it with no extra effort (like on Windows), they would say that that is actively bad.

You should be installing it from a distro package!!

What about security updates of dependencies??

And so on. Docker basically overrules these impractical ideas.

22 comments

IshKebab

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skydhash  4 months ago

It’s still actively bad. And security updates for dependencies is easy to do when the dependencies developer is not bundling those with feature changes and actively breaking the API.

graemep  4 months ago

I would say those are good point, not impractical ideas.

You make software harder to distribute (so inconvenient for developers and distributors) but gain better security updates and lower resource usage.

  • IshKebab  4 months ago

    The success of Docker shows that this is a minority view.

    • graemep  4 months ago

      I was replying to a comment comparing the distribution of self-contained binaries to Linux package management. This is a much more straightforward question

      Containers are a related (as the GP comment says) thing, but offer a different and varied set of tradeoffs.

      Those tradeoffs also depend on what you are using containers for. Scaling by deploying large numbers of containers on a cloud providers? Applications with bundled dependencies on the same physical server? As a way of providing a uniform development environment?

      4 replies →

man8alexd  4 months ago

Docker was the tool for those who couldn't create a deb or rpm package.