[mike256]

"The claim was that we needed to set up containers in our developer machines in order to run tests against a modern glibc." At first you are absolutely correct that you don't need containers for that. But then on the other hand, hey I wouldn't work for a company where I need to provide an explanation to get containers on my developer machine.

[jmmv]

Luckily, the company at play does not require an explanation to use containers on developer machines.

But when you are in charge of a remote execution service, CI pipelines, and production builds… well, this is not about a single developer machine anymore and containers may not be the right solution when you know about the details of how the software is put together.

(Yes, author here.)

[otterley]

“Containers aren’t always the right solution” is a rather unsatisfying reason to reject them. Nor, really, is the use of disk space, since disk has been cheap as chips for decades. Since you’re going against the grain of the industry, it would be useful for you to elaborate on the reasons against just using containers.

[mike256]

Yes when you are in charge of that then it is something different.

In our company we luckily have the possibility to run containers at all those stages (we are also developing container images for customers) but as developer it's still a good thing to know alternatives. It may save you time because requiring containers decides whether your build can only run on 10 new linux build agents or on all 80 that are currently deployed.