I think the "just as easily" is highly debatable. I'm not a container evangelist by any stretch, but if you were going to take a "just chroot it" approach, the very first thing you'd want to do to ease the operational burden is define some kind of standard app packaging format that defines what's in the chroot and an entry point and an environment, and maybe some scheme for mapping external data and various other niceties you get with containers, and at that point, congratulations, you've reinvented containers.

> I think the "just as easily" is highly debatable.

Heads up, you're talking about a different thing. You want to run these things as normal operations, but gunnihinn was talking about deploying an application to check if it is of any value. Chroot is just enough to make a mess as the application's developer instructed in INSTALL.txt without the need to worry about cleaning up afterwards.

And by the way, you seem to be confusing containers and Docker.

I disagree. Just google "doesn't work in chroot" and you'll be reminded of a litany of issues that come up when trying to build/run things in a chroot, and a container containing a linux distro makes a tidy little sandbox which generally avoids those issues. It's somewhere on a spectrum between a chroot and a VM, which I think a lot of people find value in.

And I'm not confusing containers and Docker, I'm just speaking a bit imprecisely. In my experience, conversations about "containers" are rarely about raw containers, but rather some specific containerization scheme and tools (e.g. docker). I suspect everyone in this entire subthread means "docker containers" when they says "containers."

> Just google "doesn't work in chroot" and you'll be reminded of a litany of issues that come up when trying to build/run things in a chroot

Yeah, some newbie forgot to mount-bind a necessary directory like /proc or /dev, didn't provide sensible /etc/resolv.conf, or messed up host's and chroot's paths, either in request or in configuration. Nothing that would render chroot unviable. Is this what you meant?

Why would anyone want to get all that right manually when containers manage all that automatically?

Good question. Why anyone presented with fancy and fashionable third party software would use a mechanism that has been present for decades, ships with the operating system, works reliably and predictably, doesn't change substantially every quarter, doesn't do any magical things to network configuration, and is easy to inspect, debug, and adjust for an outsider? Why indeed?