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Comment by rantwasp | Hacker News Reader

lol. as someone who has packaged stuff I can tell you that this K8S is orders of magnitudes more complicated. Also, once you figure out how to package stuff, you can do it in a repeatable manner - vs K8s which you basically have to babysit (upgrade/deprecations/node health/etc) forever and pay attention to all developments in the space.

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   FROM python:3.8
   RUN apt install libsomething
   ENV RELEASE=production
   COPY . .
   RUN poetry install
   CMD ["poetry", "run", "server"]

What would be the rpm/deb equivalent of those 6 lines? Would it work on MacOS?

let’s unpack this for a while.

what is python:3.8? is this reproducible?

what is apt? where is the install coming from?

What about poetry?

Yeah it’s cool for shits and giggles but when this thing breaks you’re going to be in a world of pain

for the rpm equivalent:

python setup.py bdist_rpm

wat?

Oh my. I'm not sure that I'd use Python to make a point about easy interop with distro package managers. It quickly descends into a nightmarish hellscape if you have more than a few dependencies or, different versions of python, or god forbid: C extensions.

bdist_rpm isn’t equivalent to the Dockerfile above. It can be made reproducible with a few changes (locking the upstream image to a hash, locking the apt package version), but that’s likely overkill. Because when it breaks you’re not in for a “world of pain” at all, you just have a failing CI for an hour.

I take it from the lack of an answer to the question that the equivalent non-docker packaging would be much more complex.

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