Any examples spring to mind? I’ve built apps that are only distributed as containers (because for their specific purpose it made sense and I am also the operator of the service), but if ya don’t want to run it in a container… just follow the Dockerfile’s “instructions” to package the app yourself? I’m sure I could come up with a contrived example where that would be impractical, but in almost every case a container app is just a basic install script written for a standard distro and therefore easily translatable to something else.
FOSS developers don’t owe you a pre-packaged .deb. If you think distributing one would be useful, read up on debhelper. But as someone who’s done both, Dockerfile is certainly much easier than debhelper. So “don’t need it” is a statement that only favors native packaging from the user’s perspective, not the maintainer. Can’t really fault a FOSS developer for doing the bare minimum when packaging an app.
also! it’s worth noting that not all FOSS developers are debian (or even linux) devs. Developers of open source projects including .Net Core don’t “owe” us packaging of any kind but the topic here is unnecessary containerization, not a social contract to provide it.
I am not the person who posted the original comment so this is speculation, but when they criticized “containerizing everything” I suspect they meant “Yes client, I can build that app for you, and even though your app doesn’t need it I’m going to spend additional time containerizing it so that I can bill you more” but again you’d have to ask them.
What’s wrong with containers?
I think the complaint is that apps are being designed with containerization in mind when they don’t need it
Any examples spring to mind? I’ve built apps that are only distributed as containers (because for their specific purpose it made sense and I am also the operator of the service), but if ya don’t want to run it in a container… just follow the Dockerfile’s “instructions” to package the app yourself? I’m sure I could come up with a contrived example where that would be impractical, but in almost every case a container app is just a basic install script written for a standard distro and therefore easily translatable to something else.
FOSS developers don’t owe you a pre-packaged
.deb. If you think distributing one would be useful, read up on debhelper. But as someone who’s done both,Dockerfileis certainly much easier thandebhelper. So “don’t need it” is a statement that only favors native packaging from the user’s perspective, not the maintainer. Can’t really fault a FOSS developer for doing the bare minimum when packaging an app.also! it’s worth noting that not all FOSS developers are debian (or even linux) devs. Developers of open source projects including .Net Core don’t “owe” us packaging of any kind but the topic here is unnecessary containerization, not a social contract to provide it.
I am not the person who posted the original comment so this is speculation, but when they criticized “containerizing everything” I suspect they meant “Yes client, I can build that app for you, and even though your app doesn’t need it I’m going to spend additional time containerizing it so that I can bill you more” but again you’d have to ask them.
Does “doesn’t need it” mean “wouldn’t be improved by it”? Examples?
“Yes, client! I can build that app for you! I’m going to bill you these extra items for containerization so I can get paid more”
Not sure about that hot take. Containers are here for the long run.