Re: Debian and our frenemies of containers and userland repos
On 11.07.19 17:25, Yao Wei wrote:
Hi,
It can be a "solid base" of container images and barebone systems, but
the days are numbered as operating systems as free and focused on its
mission (like Google COOS, Yocto, Alpine etc.) is evolving steady.
Could it be a disaster for us? And more importantly, do users care?
I don't think so.
COOS: just yet another special purpose distro, in that case for
docker hosts. neither the first, nor the last one to come.
Yocto: just yet another compile-yourself distro, focused on embeedded,
that happens to be hyped by certain corporations.
(for small/embedded devices, I'd really recommend ptxdist).
Alpine: yet another distro, optimized for running in small containers
BTW: the idea of building small payload/application-specific
containers/chroot's is anything but new. I've done it somewhere in
the 90th. But nowadays, these so-called "small" containers tend to be
bigger than whole machines of the 90th.
Containerization is a valid approach for some kind of workloads
(eg. specific inhouse applications) that can be easily isolated from
the rest. But it comes with the price of huge redundancies (depending
on how huge some application stacks are). And unless everybody wants
to go back of maintaining everything on his own, we still need distros.
If different applications need to deeply interact (eg. various plugin
stuff, applications calling each other, etc), containerization doesn't
help much. (eg: how can you have a pure texlive in one container and
extra things like fonts, document classes, etc, in separate ones ? :o)
The whole point about containerization isn't about packaging and
deployment of individual applications - instead it's about automatizing
the rollout of fully-configured installations.
One thing seems to be right: folks who always have been hostile towards
the whole concept of distros now have a better excuse.
--mtx
--
Enrico Weigelt, metux IT consult
Free software and Linux embedded engineering
info@metux.net -- +49-151-27565287
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