[choeger]

To the contrary. You should never expect to be able to do what you want with a system provided by someone else. Gitlab has its design decisions in their default setup and you need to take control to cater your use case. This herd mentality of "everyone is doing it this way" is really fundamentally problematic.

[stingraycharles]

Nowhere in my post am I saying "everyone is doing it this way".

You started out with asserting "you're too far into Docker", we bring up valid use cases for docker-in-docker, and then you saying "This herd mentality [..] is really fundamentally problematic" is really not adding a lot to the discussion.

[choeger]

No one brought up valid use cases for docker-in-docker. They brought up the issue that gitlab mandates docker as an interface (which I totally understand, btw.).

For instance the "how do I compose multiple docker containers" is trivial when you can just execute a script that runs docker or podman. If you really want, you can use docker-compose.