[nunez]

> Although Docker meets all these requirements, I don't really like using it. I find it slow, frustrating, and overkill for my purposes.

How so? I've been using Docker for development for years now and haven't experienced this EXCEPT with some slowness I experienced with Docker Compose upon upgrading to MacOS Catalina (which turned out to be bug with PyInstaller, not Docker or Docker Compose). This is on a Mac, btw; I hear that Docker on Linux is blazing fast.

I personally would absolutely leverage Docker for the setup being described here: multiple versions with lots of environmental differences between each other. That's what Docker was made for!

[jacobian]

I would love to read a blog post covering how to do this!

My experience has been that it's significantly more effort to meet my requirements with Docker, and that I spend a _lot_ of time waiting on Docker builds, or trying to debug finicky issues in my Dockerfile/docker-compose setup.

I'm sure all of these things have fixes -- of course they do! But I find the toolset challenging, and the documentation difficult to follow. I'd love to learn what I'm missing, but I also need to balance that against Getting Shit Done.

[jsmeaton]

The build step for installing or upgrading a package can be a killer with nontrivial projects.

[maksimum]

It seems like long builds are either (a) necessary or (b) user error. (a) If you have a tree of dependencies and you change the root, you should rebuild everything that depends on it to make sure it's still compatible. (b) if you placed your application into one of the initial Dockerfile layers, but then you're installing dependencies that don't depend on you, it's user error.

What's the situation where your application needs to go first in the Dockerfile, and then you need to put a bunch of stuff that doesn't depend on your application?