[stanleydrew]

> I have a silly theory that I only half joke about that docker/containers wouldn't've ever taken off as fast as it did if it didn't solve the horrible python dependency hell so well.

I don't think this is a silly theory at all. The only possibly silly part is that containers specifically helped solve this problem just for python. Lots of other software systems built with other languages have "dependency hell."

[bb88]

Back in the early days of Redhat, rpm's didn't really have good dependency management. Yes there were rpms, yes you could download them, but getting the full dep tree was a PITA. Most people installed the full Linux distro rather than a lightweight version because of this.

Debian's apt-get was very "apt" at the time when it came out. It solved the entire issue for Debian. There was a point at which there was an apt-rpm for redhat. Yum tried to solve it for redhat, but didn't really work that well -- particularly if you needed to pin packages to certain versions.