Docker and the OCI container ecosystem

I agree there should be more tools like this - it's not that hard. The thing you lose with these approaches is any easy "bootstrap" step to set up the build system in the first place. If you put the build system in a docker container, then you get back to something like a multistage Dockerfile anyway (for simple projects - complex projects can still benefit from these more advanced systems).

Also be aware of cross compiling. In the FOSS community, we would like to support our non-intel brethren and this requires building images for platforms you don't have by default. Some systems (yocto) are good at this, others (bazel) are still maturing. Docker buildx makes this very easy through transparent emulation, again if you're willing to settle for Dockerfiles.

For me, the combination of cross compiling and easy bootstrap means I use docker buildx for all my simpler projects, and just put up with the awkward Dockerfile syntax :-(

The big one I do is to simply have a shell script that does all the work of setting up the docker image. The dockerfile only copies in the script and required assets and the script does all the work of actually setting it up. Of course you can do the same thing with makefiles or scons or whatever build tool you like using. This reduces things to a single COPY and single RUN command.

Along with that it's useful to do multistage builds.

https://docs.docker.com/develop/develop-images/multistage...

This is especially nice if you want to do statically compiled binaries. You end up with a build container and a runtime container. You only then need to distribute the runtime container. This results in a very clean OCI image with all the build-time and setup portions stripped out. It is usually very easy to keep things down well under a 100MB in size.

As far as getting rid of dockerfile itself... It is probably not worth it at this stage. Everybody and their mom supports it and thus it makes it easy to integrate containers into CI/CD workflows, among other things. Sefl-hosting build farms in kubernetes is extremely easy with kaniko. You can use buildah and other associated tools related to podman. Gitlab, github, and most everything else supports building and testing against OCI images.

I do prefer buildah's approach though.

Actually I would prefer a scheme that used a content addressable datastore instead of the layering thing, something like ostree or casync (or git, really that would be most convenient, but git has some missing features when dealing with large binary files)

The templates currently offer two modes of operation for generating images: A simple one where one can just specify the base system packages to be installed, and a generic one which allows running a script to set up the filesystem arbitrarily.

The templates produce a single layer, but it can be based on any other image (by default a standard image of one of the supported base distros), which is included as separate layers. This allows efficient sharing of common base contents.