He/she is talking about being able to deploy a `Dockerfile` or use `docker-compose` / `docker-machine` on FreeBSD.

It's very common in backend development to run a Dockerized version of Redis/Postgres for local testing/development. A lot of developers develop Go/Python/Rust/node.js/etc. on a Mac, then deploy it to nix. They would need to deploy the same Docker containers built locally (or in CI/CD) to BSD, which seems unsupported given the comments.

I see, but I thought the selling point of docker was reproducibility, which was thanks to the image. The Dockerfile is not truly reproducible, and the image once created it is typically created with linux binary.

I think docker is a glorified zip file, but if that would help popularize FreeBSD more I wouldn't mind that feature. I guess linux compatibility layer could help here as well.

> The Dockerfile is not truly reproducible

What makes you say that?

Tons of examples where it works on developer's computer, but doesn't in production or someone's elses computer.

Dockerfile is not ensuring that build is fully reproducible, it's just list of steps to build the image. There are many issues with it, but biggest offender is due network access, if you're updating your package repo or downloading a file, there's a high chance that the resulting image is different every time. Dockerfile is as reproducible as a bash script. The only thing that's reproducible is the resulting image, but at that point so is a zip file.

Try this experiment. Build an image from a non-trivial Dockerfile today. Then make another image from the same Dockerfile in another couple of months and see if it is identical to today's image.

And? Mac and Linus systems have the same issues, yet my laptop is a mac and most of my docker hosts are linux.