The Curse of Docker
š äøęē The ORIGINAL post čÆ Iām heading to Las Vegas for re:invent soon, perhaps the most boring type of industry extravaganza there could be. In that spirit, I thought I would write something quick and oddly professional: Iām going to complain about Docker. Packaging software is one of those fundamental problems in system administration. Itās so important, so influential on the way a system is used, that package managers are often the main identity of operating systems. Consider Windows: the operating systemās most alarming defect in the eyes of many āLinux peopleā is its lack of package management, despite Microsoftās numerous attempts to introduce the concept. Well, perhaps more likely, because of the number of those attempts. And still, in the Linux world, distributions are differentiated primarily by their approach to managing software repositories. I donāt just mean the difference between dpkg and rpm, but rather more fundamental decisions, like opinionated vs. upstream configuration and stable repositories vs. a rolling release. RHEL and Arch share the vast majority of their implementation and yet have very different vibes. ...