[ForkMeOnTinder]

I fully agree with you. That said, one thing I've come to hate is the proliferation of version numbers in random dockerfiles and random config files all over the place. It's a pain to know what's out of date and a pain to upgrade it all. I wish there was a single tool to manage it all more simply, something like pnpm for containers plus everything you install inside them.

[earthling8118]

Nix. It's the best I've seen for this use case so far. I pin the dependencies using flakes and make container images with specific packages I need

It's not 100% perfect for managing exact versions because you update nixpkgs and many packages update as a result, but you can pretty easily pin multiple versions of it or override the version for a specific package

[stavros]

Nix sounds great, unfortunately I never managed to install it reliably.