Ask HN: Why are some projects defaulting to Docker for public use?

7 points

8 years ago

Hi HN! I'm a bit old school, wanting to run my software packages from OS repos or compiling them myself, creating aliases for them and such. Recently, I have encountered a bunch of great open source projects that just say "Docker run" this in order to use it.

Why do they expect me to be able to use Docker by default?

Even for really simple projects with not a lot of dependancies. Example: https://github.com/adtac/commento#getting-started

Isn't it a major selling point of Go to be able to ship single binaries that "just run"? Why enforce Docker on users? To my eyes, it looks like I'm expected to run a (fast/quick)VM for every software package in an operating system. Why?

Is there any common knowledge of extracting a software package out of such "dockerized" projects that I don't know of?

Any educating in this respect is appreciated.

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