[clan]

I can sympathize. It makes sense.

But...

As a veteran admin I am tired of reading trough Docker files to guess how to do a native setup. You can never suss out the intent from those files - only do haphazardous guesses.

It smells too much like "the code is the documentation".

I am fine that the manual install steps are hidden deep in the dungeons away from the casual users.

But please do not replace Posix compliance with Docker compliance.

Look at Immich for an unfortunate example. Theys have some nice high level architecture documentation. But the "whys" of the Dockerfile is nowhere to be found. Makes it harder to contribute as it caters to the Docker crowd only and leaves a lot of guesswork for the Posix crowd.

[arthurfirst]

Veteran sysadmin of 30 years... UNIX sysadmin and developer...

I use docker+compose for my dev projects for about the past 12 years. Very tough to beat the speed of development with multi-tier applications.

To me Dockerfiles seem like the perfect amount of DSL but still flexible because you can literally run any command as a RUN line and produce anything you want for layer. Dockerfiles seem to get it right. Maybe the 'anything' seems like a mis-feature but if you use it well it's a game changer.

Dockerfiles are also an excellent way to distribute FOSS to people who unlike you or I cannot really manage a systems, install software, etc without eventually making a mess or getting lost (i.e. jr developers?).

Are their supply chain risks? sure -- Like many package systems. I build my important images from scratch all the time just to mitigate this. There's also Podman with Podfiles if you want something more FOSS friendly but less polished.

All that said, I generally containerize production workloads but not with Docker. If a dev project is ready for primetime now I port it to Kubernetes. Used to be BSD Jails .

[movedx]

> Dockerfiles are also an excellent way to distribute FOSS to people who unlike you or I cannot really manage a systems, install software, etc without eventually making a mess or getting lost (i.e. jr developers?).

Read what you just said:

> ... to people who unlike you or I cannot really manage a systems ...

These are people who should not be running systems.

> I build my important images from scratch all the time...

I doubt it, but assuming you're telling the truth, then you're a rare cookie because my clients don't even do that, and they're either government bodies with millions in funding or enterprises with 60,000 employees across the entire globe.

Again, the art of the operating system, and managing it, has been lost. It's been replaced with something that adds even more problems, security or otherwise, for the sake of convenience.

I hope everything works out super well for you, friend.