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0x457 | on: AlpineBSD
> people who needed a relatively full-featured build environment against musl

Yeah, I called this out as the main appeal of alpine. IMO no one should be using musl, but its another story.

> or people who had a test/deploy/debug cycle on environments that necessarily had no layer cache (ephemeral VMs, one-shot kubernetes clusters, OpenWRT routers that lost the layer cache on reboot). Or people with network-constrained traffic from registries or mirrors thereof.

Debian slim is ~30 MB compressed, and distroless/static is ~2 MiB. Small images aren’t unique to Alpine. With a fast local mirror, the extra download is negligible.

> Or people in environments that took container security findings (perhaps too) seriously and were tired of triaging endless reports for random dependencies in "FROM ubuntu" containers, and wanted a default required-by-policy base image that didn't come with the world.

1) Nobody’s forcing you to use a full Ubuntu image.

2) Alpine images still get plenty of security findings, often in the same dependencies your application needs regardless of the base image.

3) Nix is the best container builder anyway.

zbentley | parent
You're not wrong, but both "nobody should be using musl" and "nobody's forcing you to use a full-fat distro image" often run into the reality that the choice of base image, security posture, and libc/linkage environment for distributables are, by policy or technical requirements imposed by third parties, not under the control of the person who is trying to make Docker images behave.