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There is no such thing as a “glibc based alpine image”

ariadne.space

11–20 of 204 posts

Re: There is no such thing as a “glibc based alpine image”

#11
post #8
post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What's wrong with that is the reason trademarks exist: Confusion. If something is called "alpine-glibc", it's reasonable to expect that it's by the alpine people and supported like alpine. This, as we see here, annoys the alpine people because they now get bug reports and support requests from people using it, and have to direct people elsewhere. And when it doesn't work, they get the hit to their image even tho they…

I think it's clear from the website that this is based on Alpine and not part of the project https://hub.docker.com/r/frolvlad/alpine-glibc/ Without context, I think what this guy is pissed off about is that this project enables people to use alpine to run proprietary software.

It doesn't outright state anywhere that it's not an official alpine product, and I don't know if everyone reads the site - many people will just copy the "FROM frolvlad/alpine-glibc" from elsewhere.

In any case, the Alpine people would know, and they apparently think it's a problem.

>Without context,

But you have context here! It has issues with symbol versioning! There is "strange behavior and possible crashes, ". This makes alpine look bad, because people think it's the alpine project's fault!

> what this guy is pissed off

Please don't assume everyone is a "guy". In this case, Ariadne is not a "he" (she uses "she"), so a male-coded word like "guy" is ill-fitting.

Re: There is no such thing as a “glibc based alpine image”

#12

"I don't like you exercising your right to foss, so we are going to make using foss harder for you". Foss shouldn't be about us going out on our way to block others.

> Foss shouldn't be about us going out on our way to block others.

Sure, but this is about the Alpine project getting tired of being mistaken for the maintainers of a fork of their project.

How would you feel if the power company would call you every week because they think your someone else and you had to explain the same thing every week?

Re: There is no such thing as a “glibc based alpine image”

#13
I don't get it. There's a docker image called alpine-ruby. I presume that isn't supported by the alpine team either, but, honestly speaking, I'm doubtful that's causing enough of a support load on them. If it is, I would assume the reasonable solution to that is to close any support requests with "We are not responsible for that image" or something of that variant, or even requesting the creator of the image to mention that in the docs, but preventing users from installing ruby on alpine (!!!), not just images?

Re: There is no such thing as a “glibc based alpine image”

#14

A side-note about glibc: I have only ever had problems with glibc versioned symbols. The only thing they more or less do is to pin an old executable to old library versions, and you can supposedly install a newer version of the library. You then save a little bit of disk space. - It doesn't allow you to install minor versions of the same library at the same time (thats how you end up with all these 1.so, 2.so) - So i…

Would you not just have more subtle, harder to debug problems if it were not for versioned symbols?

Re: There is no such thing as a “glibc based alpine image”

#15

"I don't like you exercising your right to foss, so we are going to make using foss harder for you". Foss shouldn't be about us going out on our way to block others.

> Foss shouldn't be about us going out on our way to block others. Sure, but this is about the Alpine project getting tired of being mistaken for the maintainers of a fork of their project. How would you feel if the power company would call you every week because they think your someone else and you had to explain the same thing every week?

How are they being mistaken? No where do they claim to be the official Alpine image. This is like saying anyone who uploads an Alpine image with a few self-built packages installed is somehow conflating themselves with representing Alpine Linux, when in fact there is nothing the creator of this image has done to indicate that they are in any way considered the official Alpine project. In fact, Docker Hub has a place for official images. If someone is mistaking this package as being supported by Alpine Linux as a whole, then they also the same people that would mistake Google for any app installed from the Google Play Store.

Re: There is no such thing as a “glibc based alpine image”

#16
post #9
post #2

I've definitely had my share of annoyances with musl-libc and would probably consider building my base images around distroless if that were something I were dealing with right now. In the meantime, it's kinda shitty of someone to casually squat on the alpine linux namespace. If you want to make a small distribution that also ships glibc, then it's not alpine. Don't call it that.

I've had to battle quite a few portability issues, but everytime it was a program incorrectly assuming some sort of behaviour from glibc and not really musl's fault.

We had to stop using alpine because we have to resolve a DNS name that resolved in a 100 hosts. Musl fails to resolve that because it does not support “upgrade to TCP” and the response does not fit into single UDP packet so it gets truncated, so node fails to resolve the name. And not only node, normal Linux tools as well. And the author says it’s a feature, not a bug so for me it is kinda hard to take that thing seriously when parts of standard are unsupported.

Re: There is no such thing as a “glibc based alpine image”

#17
This is seriously the saddest and dumbest post I've seen in a long time. Someone decides to build an Alpine package without ever claiming it is part of the official Alpine distro, you can't even install it using the default Alpine repos, and then they created a Docker image with it already installed... and somehow someone wants to complain and threaten to block the package from even being installed. This is like Microsoft levels of bad for FOSS, maybe even worse. No where are they claiming to represent the official Alpine image. I have plenty of Docker images that use Alpine as a base image. Am I somehow representing that they represent the official Alpine image? No. I wonder if this person is just bored, or mad in general and wanted to find something pointless to complain about.

Re: There is no such thing as a “glibc based alpine image”

#18
post #5
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's alpine with glibc I don't see what's wrong with calling it that

It makes it look like an "official" project. Just give it a different name and explain that it's Alpine with glibc somewhere

It does not. They use Alpine in the name so people can find the image. Searching for Alpine on Docker Hub has 49,530 results. This image doesn't even show up on the first page of results. I think whoever wrote this needs to rethink how ridiculous they are being.

Re: There is no such thing as a “glibc based alpine image”

#19
post #6
post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's alpine with glibc I don't see what's wrong with calling it that

Except it's not, as it mixes glibc with musl in ways that induce undefined behaviour you don't expect. If it was recompiling all packages to use glibc, the name would be more appropriate… but also still a trademark violation.

So, of the 49,530 images that show up with several using Alpine somewhere in the name or description... you think this is a trademark violation how? Alpine is synonymous with lightweight images. Several people and vendors use it in their image names.

Re: There is no such thing as a “glibc based alpine image”

#20
Just checked out the GitHub repo. Apparently the author can't even be bothered with posting an issue seeing if there may be a more appropriate name for the GH repo, although I personally see nothing wrong with the name as it is merely a package that you have to manually install.
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