Back to FreeBSD – Part 2 – Jails • Hacker News Board

Re: Back to FreeBSD – Part 2 – Jails

#31

Post by sharts » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 5:57 PM UTC

sunshine-o wrote: post #18

The article is written by the people who created jail.run [0] Ten years in with Docker and Linux containers I felt something was very wrong so I looked at how Solaris and FreeBSD were doing it and I saw the light (too). I would agree with them: bringing the Dockerfile format to jails doesn't make any sense, unless you just want to attract curious Linux users. Dockerfiles are useful and familiar but are also an abomin…

If said system also targets Linux then that would be cool. Otherwise we just get another new way to do something on one OS and doesn’t at all help bridge the gap.

Re: Back to FreeBSD – Part 2 – Jails

#32

Post by LoganDark » Wed, Apr 01, 2026, 11:04 PM UTC

trashb wrote: post #19

nine_k wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very often you can, or could, because the software is portable (e.g. Node or Python or Postgres), and / or platform-independent (e.g. written in JS, Python, bash, etc). In my practice it was completely normal to build things inside a container to be deployed on Linux using the same sources and basically the same package names and versions as used on a developer macOS machine (which is BSD-like enough down below).

> macOS machine (which is BSD-like enough down below) That's like saying an Ubuntu .deb will work on Gentoo because it's all Linux anyway. It's not that simple. There is dependencies and there are differences in the packages, package managers and surrounding system for a reason. It's not 1:1. Perhaps the naming scheme happened to line up for the packages you where using, but this should be considered not assumed. It…

This is called https://brew.sh

Re: Back to FreeBSD – Part 2 – Jails

#33

Post by pjmlp » Thu, Apr 02, 2026, 6:21 AM UTC

To note that HP-UX Vaults and Solaris Zones predate these efforts, where only BSD and Linux keep being discussed.

With IBM and Unisys big iron predating ever further in the historic evolution, outside UNIX based operating systems.