mhoye
If we think of code as a tool for expressing a collective understanding of a shared problem in a way that’s culturally durable - and sure, maybe I’m the only person who does, fine - then containerization works against a collective social goal while accepting a dependency on corporate cloud provisioning.
Taking that argument a small step further gives me, at least, this observation: containerization counts as complying in advance.
Carlos O'Donell
@mhoye @cks Isn't this every engineering problem on the planet? I don't know how EUV lithography works, but I use a CPU every day. Is it hubris to believe we could possibly understand everything? How is containerization different from everything else we do in engineering? Some containers are well understood and constructed using source-to-image technologies. I choose when I desire to stop understanding... or we summon @azonenberg 😃 and start the expensive understanding?
Carlos O'Donell
@mhoye @cks @azonenberg ... to put it another way, the code to make the containers exists, containers just made shipping binary artifacts easier. So easy that engineering discipline is left behind by those who don't wish to practice it as the limiting factor in their ability to innovate. When I install a container I now have to ask myself: Do I trust the person who put this binary artifact together? A distribution with established norms is a pretty good proxy.
Rich Felker
@codonell @mhoye @cks @azonenberg The problem isn't that abstraction is wrong but that containers are an extraordinarily bad abstraction, using multiple orders of magnitude more resources than the actual application would and mixing information that's intended to be abstracted (actual runtime of the application) with things that shouldn't (policy, all sorts of things related to accessibility like font choices & rendering options, display scale, sound behavior, etc.) and that become inaccessible when tucked inside the abstraction layer. It's a lazy cop-out that breaks everything folks worked hard to make work well.
mhoye
@cks it’s fundamentally an argument that understanding is cheap enough to think of as disposable.
Chris Siebenmann
@mhoye As a sysadmin, containers irritate me because they amount to abandoning the idea of well done, well organized, well understood, etc installation of software. Can't make your software install in a sensible way that people can control and limit? Throw it into a container, who cares what it sprays where across the filesystem and how much it wants to be the exclusive owner and controller of everything in sight.
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