[mikepurvis]

I mean if we're going full pie in the sky, fully declarative containers exist today:

https://github.com/nlewo/nix2container#nix2container

Dagger looks nifty, but it's too bad that it's still basically an imperative "start from thing, do stuff to it, publish" kind of model, rather than just expressing a desired end state and letting an underlying engine find its way there.

[shykes]

Dagger is fully declarative. It's just built on a dynamic declarative API, instead of a static declarative DSL.

So, if you took Nix, and replaced the static scheme-like DSL with a proper API, and then built SDKs in 5 languages for that API; and then built a bash-like shell also for easy scripting; then you would start to have something that approximates Dagger.

[mikepurvis]

I stand corrected! I shall investigate more closely with this additional context. Thanks.

[shykes]

Thanks for giving it another chance! We need to get better at explaining all this, it's a lot to unpack, although prior experience with declarative systems like Nix or Bazel does help a lot :)

We have a very active discord, feel free to come by and ask all the tough questions!