Just one more wrapper around runc, i promise just one more wrapper and then cloud-native is done, come on bro just one more coordination layer i swear just one more api come on bro just one more
@danderson I wish that, as an industry, we'd stop rewarding people for "solving" the difficulties of one complicated system by wrapping it in a new complicated system that is trying REALLY HARD to look different from the old complicated system (as it painstakingly reproduces the same complications with different warts).
Ideally our systems wouldn't be so complicated in the first place, ha, but I'd settle for harm reduction at this point.
@creachadair A hot take I held back: this is what happens when you embrace the alleged unix philosophy of small tools. Turns out that only works if there isn't immense money behind creating 15 of every tool and then being forced to make every combination of all of them function correctly.
@danderson Yeah. Though arguably we didn't even really do that, because with a few exceptions, none of the container ecosystem tools do ANYTHING independent of a huge hairball of related nonsense in harness. So it's more of an artist's impression of the philosophy than a real implementation of it.
@creachadair So far I'm finding it's a weird combination of all of the above. It's mostly onion shells around each other, but also the interface between each layer is pluggable, so at each of the half dozen layers you can choose 2-3 implementations that are essentially the same but just different enough that something two layers up cares only works on one of them
@creachadair Genuine path I walked today: "oh, podman takes 15 minutes to create a container because fuse-overlay is unavailable so it fell back to the old and bad vfs storage driver. Okay fixed that, but now DNS doesn't work because slirp4netns sandboxing isn't compatible with certain symlink chains and fails silently. Apparently the fix is to use pasta instead but it doesn't work with this version of podman, but I did find some sigils to paste into a config file which somehow fixes it."
@creachadair Truly the best way to make a robust program for running on a single computer, is to break it up into 11 microservices that all communicate over json APIs, silently change their behavior based on secret reasons, and log nothing. Yup.
@danderson You can tell a lot about how much it will hurt to use a project from the degree of excitement its maintainers have about everything being pluggable.
They say: "you can do anything!"
I hear: "I have to do everything"
Good design choices are hard. But not making them never helps.
@creachadair This is a reason I deeply admire and respect GNU Guix: they made a number of decisions that make it fundamentally incompatible with my needs, but they did that on purpose, for good reasons, because they knew what they wanted to build, and have consistently stuck to their strange guns for years.
It infuriates me that I cannot use the good bits that are strapped to the deal-breakers... And yet still a massive fan of how they broke with tradition and actually made some choices!
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