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by yjftsjthsd-h 1273 days ago
> run this thing, scroll up past dozens of pages of stdout noise and manually deal w/ the errors buried therein by looking up relevant FAQs in some doc somewhere

Okay, but if you can define/script your environment enough to run in a pod, couldn't you just run that locally? You already have to solve the manual steps either way...
2 comments
debosmit 1273 days ago
Re: if a computer can run scripts in a pod, can’t you just run them locally?

It’s a construct of the order of operations.

One core issue with local is the variety of OS’ and local build tools that would fundamentally mess with the centralized scripts. Getting company-wide setup scripts to work on top of existing laptop config was a continuous challenge. Hence, having a consistent baseline (OS flavor, system-level packages) on top of which the company-wide “setup script” is added followed by “developer-customizations” seems to work great.

Central teams can manage the first couple of steps and individual user-specific configuration can be managed much better in a decentralized manner.

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lhorie 1273 days ago
It's the same convo as docker: can't one just use setup scripts for reproducible envs? In theory yes, but in practice, theory and practice aren't the same thing.

It's easier to apply best practices to a greenfield project written in a modern language (hence devpods) than trying to comb through a decade+ of tech debt written in bash.

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