Comment by theamk

by "today's engineers", do you mean "2001 engineers"?

That's when sbuild[0], a tool to build deb packages in containers, was created. It was pretty innovative in that it started from clean container every time, and thus would build deb in a reliable way even if user's machine had some funky dependencies installed.

(Note that was schroot containers, docker did not exist back then)

[0] https://metadata.ftp-master.debian.org/changelogs//main/s/sb...