Re:Ask HN: What are the best-designed things you've ever used?
by joconde on Sunday November 28, 2021 @12:51PM
(#29371053)
> this is more of a mismatch between Dockerfile functionality and what you want to do. Dockerfiles are not designed to execute general-purpose programs, so there is an assumption in the design of Dockerfiles that you know (more or less) which files you want to COPY ahead of time.
I don't follow that. In a Dockerfile, I want to install software, and software is usually distributed in packages like .deb. Why can I `RUN apt-get install libabc` and have a clean, automatic install of libabc, but not do the same with a libabc.deb file on my host filesystem?
> It sounds like you want a mechanism for COPYing all filesystem changes resulting from a RUN instruction without having to know what those changes are ahead of time.
That's one way of doing it, but it's more complex than the obvious solution:
> I don't follow the part about mounting a host dir in the build (how it would help)
It simply lets me give the build container access to libabc.deb, so I can `RUN apt-get install /mnt/host_folder/libabc.deb`, which will install libabc without putting `libabc.deb` itself in an image layer.
It would have been trivial to add this, but the Docker devs rejected it because "multi-stage builds can do this" (wrong), and it would lead to "non-reproducible builds" (because downloading packages from the network is somehow more reproducible?).
They finally added it as a non-standard option, which means a build process that relies on it won't work with a Docker install that uses the default config. It's the devs making it needlessly hard to use Docker for a perfectly valid use case.
If you're wondering why I want to install that locally-built software via a .deb, it's because we want to distribute it to all our systems, and we want to have only one packaging method to maintain.
I don't follow that. In a Dockerfile, I want to install software, and software is usually distributed in packages like .deb. Why can I `RUN apt-get install libabc` and have a clean, automatic install of libabc, but not do the same with a libabc.deb file on my host filesystem?
> It sounds like you want a mechanism for COPYing all filesystem changes resulting from a RUN instruction without having to know what those changes are ahead of time.
That's one way of doing it, but it's more complex than the obvious solution:
> I don't follow the part about mounting a host dir in the build (how it would help)
It simply lets me give the build container access to libabc.deb, so I can `RUN apt-get install /mnt/host_folder/libabc.deb`, which will install libabc without putting `libabc.deb` itself in an image layer.
It would have been trivial to add this, but the Docker devs rejected it because "multi-stage builds can do this" (wrong), and it would lead to "non-reproducible builds" (because downloading packages from the network is somehow more reproducible?).
They finally added it as a non-standard option, which means a build process that relies on it won't work with a Docker install that uses the default config. It's the devs making it needlessly hard to use Docker for a perfectly valid use case.
If you're wondering why I want to install that locally-built software via a .deb, it's because we want to distribute it to all our systems, and we want to have only one packaging method to maintain.