[zokier]

Funny, I think using FROM ubuntu takes away the main benefits of Docker, namely the ability to have perfectly groomed execution environment, that is also fully reproducible and with minimal external dependencies. Basically having immutable infrastructure and infrastructure as code as the core pillars, enabling them to be so smooth that live mutation etc would be unnecessary.

[TheDong]

Weird, if "fully reproducible" and "groomed/minimal" environments were the goal of docker, I'd expect image tags to not be mutable, the "FROM" line in a Dockerfile to only take immutable hash references, and for the default `docker build` environment to have no network access. At the very least, `docker build` should accept and produce a "lock" like file which specifies the source image it came from, and mark anything that does a network request (e.g. `apt-get update`) as tainted and unreproducible.

There are plenty of ways to create reproducible minimal images (such as using the nix package manager to create the rootfs), but the official docker images don't use those techniques and the docker tooling and ecosystem actively fight against it.

Docker is clearly focused on usability / first-user-experience at the expense of reproducibility and immutability. They encourage the use of the 'latest' tag, they encourage the use of procedural network-heavy build steps, and they have made not attempt to promote or create alternative tooling which tackles reproducibility correctly.

[mickeyp]

But you can already do this.

FROM myregistry.example.com/foo:1.2.3@sha256:<hash>

You can call `docker build --network=none` to disable network access during the build step.

Why would you make a lock file from a Dockerfile? You can specify everything inside it already; from the version you pull with yum to explicitly COPY'ing RPMs/debs you keep locally.