This seems absurd. Just apt install irssi. Why Docker for such a simple self contained tiny app?
Came here to ask why you'd want to run an app in docker. Genuinely don't get it. Sure the app doesn't touch the host system so there's isolation there, but the extra overhead doesn't seem justified to me. I'm not docker expert, so correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't this running a striped down version of Linux to run the app? Lighter than a full VM but... Yeah I don't get it.
Docker on Linux is a pretty thin layer of abstraction, but still, I prefer to run stuff raw metal whenever possible; which today even raw metal isn't quite common.
I love watching this in tech, the pendulum swings, this is static linking in another dress, Soon everyone adopts this, and then someone complains “why is there 500 libc libraries on my machine” or “there was critical bug and I had to update 388 containers - and some maintainers didn’t update and it’s a giant mess!” Then someone will invent dynamic underlying container sharing (tm) and the pendulum will swing the othe…
> And so on, back and forward forever My god, we've discovered a genuine perpetual motion machine. > this is static linking in another dress Although static linking usually seems to result in small binaries that just run on the target machine while this needs all the Docket machinary (and the image sizes can get horrendous)
It's worse, it's reverse perpetual motion. It takes an infinite amount of energy to achieve something you could achieve with a tiny finite amount!
I find part of the fun of dockerising small apps is in trying to get the image as small as possible with as few files in it as I can. This one looks like it still contains a lot of stuff that's not needed. For example, my exim image https://hub.docker.com/r/grepular/exim4 is built like this: https://gitlab.com/grepular/docker-exim4/-/blob/main/Dockerf... - The final image only contains the necessary executables, shar…
It's a fun exercise but I don't see it as useful for most things I run.
xxx/znc 25.4MB
xxx/oidentd 10.6MB
this is based on alpine and at most I could save 30MB total. Not worth the effort for me.
Not that irssi releases all that often, but one benefit being glossed over is you could docker run a newer version than your distro has available in their package repository.
Poor mans abstraction. Docker swarm makes a cheap node pool from random hardware. Compose makes all your apps and config live in git. You don't _need_ docker, but if you are already set up for it then it's a boon. Adding an app for me to be very available across a fleet of hardware with ceph backed storage is a one-liner.
> Adding an app for me to be very available across a fleet of hardware with ceph backed storage is a one-liner. But irssi is a chat client: About Irssi is a modular text mode chat client. It comes with IRC support built in.[0] 0 - https://irssi.org/
And I want my irs client to be around and keep my history. If it is a tool I use every day then it lives in my git repo.
This seems absurd. Just apt install irssi. Why Docker for such a simple self contained tiny app?
And then after that turn it back into a binary that starts it up as a firecracker microvm! Lol, I mean it's kinda crazy yeah, but I the isolation is pretty good/cool.
The docker image is built by the devs. Not in this case, it isn't. All of the things you describe are just "package manager, but outside distro control," which is fine I guess but not really a meaningful answer.
I think the real answer is that distro packaging sucks; it tends to involve arcane distro-specific tools and introduce as many or more bugs than it fixes (with the added problem of playing hot potato with the bug reports), on top of delaying updates. Really, what do you gain by using distro packages? (I know the answer is supposedly that you get a set of well-tested versions of your applications that play nice with e…
I don't disagree with that assessment, but I'm not sure docker's any different. It's just a different arcane set of tools that introduces as many failure points as it fixes (with the added problem of supply chain attacks) on top of having to use all the distro stuff anyway. So, while I use the hell out of docker, I don't really regard it as an improvement on (or really an alternative to) distro packages. I think it's a better tool for solving complex deployments, but e.g. irssi isn't really in that camp.