The size of Alpine and its package manager are brilliant. What gets me, and my team, is the support policy for “older” packages.

For a while we would pin library versions (e.g. libvips) only to have the pin break the build because the package was no longer provided. That’s only a few months later, not years. It seriously impacts the repeatability of Docker builds.

Now we don’t pin to the same extent and lack some confidence, but at least it doesn’t break the build.