The issue with simple solutions is that the underlying problem still has the same complexity. This complexity rises up sooner or later and depending on your abstraction will be nice caught within it or make a complete mess.

I really wish something like singularity containers had taken over -- that was literally just shell commands.

Possibly https://buildah.io/ would be of interest.

I do use podman, not really stoked about buildah because it's still a bunch of buildah commands in a shell-driven DSL, which I suppose is better than a dockerfile. Singularity was literally a build file that was a shell script divided into sections that denoted phases.

Bit late now but you could probably make something like it using buildkit - https://github.com/moby/buildkit/blob/master/examples/buildk...

I can't say Docker is simpler than Nix.

I found Nix way easier, but the documentation is very... concise.

I call this. It isn't a single abstraction over shell. It is a single closure over shell. And that is surprisingly hard to explain.

Again, though, I am glad both are thriving. Competition of implementation is... not that compelling to me. Competition of approach, is amazing.