[zerotolerance]

There are a few tragedies in the Docker story, but at least two are specifically tied to naming things. First, Swarm (mode) because by the time they released Swarm (mode) the world had already taken a collective dump on Swarm (the proof-of-concept). Even in 2024 most of the time people talk about Swarm and start dumping on it they're actually talking about the proof-of-concept architecture. Second, they should never have called the subcommand "build." It isn't building anything. In this case "build" is performing a packaging step with very raw tools. But the minute they called it build people started literally building software INSIDE intermediate container layers on the way to assembling a packaged container. Dockerfile is about as weak of a build tool as you could possibly ask for. Zero useful features with respect to building software. But Docker named it "build" and now we've got Dockerfile calling compilation steps, test commands, and dependency retrieval steps.

[Noumenon72]

What is the alternative? Like one pipeline step running Gradle or make or something and then copying the result into your container that's basically an apt-get and nothing else?

[imtringued]

I don't see how this is a tragedy. You're blowing something trivial out of proportion.

When you build alpine packages, you literally have to call abuild on your APKBUILD files. It's the same for Arch Linux. The files are called PKGBUILD. So even if you decide to package your applications (uh, using docker run? that changes nothing!) before docker build and then install them with the OS package manager, you will run into exactly the same thing.

[jahewson]

I can just imagine someone inside Docker, inc. saying “the name is not important” or over and over again until one day they ship it. They’ll never know what they missed out on.