[Vampiero]

Cool story but at least try to give some argumentation when you say stuff like:

>The design of the language in Dockerfile is ad hoc in a bad way. It’s difficult to understand, for me, and easy to make mistakes.

Because that reads like a skill issue to me

[xyproto]

Not writing all software in machine code is also a skill issue.

The question is not if it's a skill issue or not, but if the complexity of the solution matches the complexity of the problem domain. And also: if there are easier and clearer ways to reach the same goals.

[9dev]

Dockerfiles provide a small set of operations to create a reproducible software artefact. I have been doing this for a while, I’ve seen POM files, Groovy Pipelines, endless shell scripts, Makefiles, and lots more. From all those, Dockerfiles do not seem like an absurdly complex solution to the problem to me.

[p_ing]

Bingo. Which is why that k8s fad was inappropriate for almost everyone out there. Your app could have run under cron every hour once an hour on an i586 but you had to spin k8s because it was "cool".

[EdwardDiego]

I really hate "skill issue" as a response

[gjvc]

agree, not everyone has / had a mentor

[homebrewer]

Dockerfile is one of the worst parts of docker — it's a primitive shell-like DSL that didn't have to exist and that feels like it was designed by a person with a couple of hours of experience in writing shell scripts.

Instead of providing a set of separate tools to be glued together with a proper shell or a full programming language, they designed this nonsense that can't even do 1/10th of what busybox is able to do, and have been in the business of adding the missing pieces (like `COPY --chmod`) for the past 10+ years.

It has taken them about a decade to add HEREDOC support, for example. Most dockerfiles still use

  RUN foo && \
      bar && \
      baz

instead of

  RUN <<END
    set -eu
    foo
    bar
    baz
  END

I avoid dockerfiles and prefer using buildah for building containers. Since they're all using the same specification, it doesn't matter what runtime is then used to run them: it can be docker, podman, k8s, whatever.

Here's the official example of building a lighttpd container:

https://github.com/containers/buildah/blob/92015b7f4301d7eb8...

You can eschew bash and call these commands however you want — from a python script, or Go, or even assembly.

[SlightlyLeftPad]

Fair but there are some specific mechanisms that are particularly poorly documented and designed, like exposing gpus and cifs/nfs mounts as a couple examples.

[manosyja]

> skill issue

liw is Lars Wirzenius, so I assume we can rule that out.

[Hizonner]

Trivial things should not require skill.

[gjvc]

relevant https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34383754