Docker is too general, too much of a Swiss army knife for this particular problem. The problem I am talking about is where a C++ program has all of its dependencies vendored into the source tree. When you run Make, everything including the dependencies build at the same time. All you need is a chroot, namespaces, cgroups, btrfs, squashfs--plain old Linux APIs--to make sure the compiler has a consistent view of the system. Assuming the compiler and filesystem are well behaved (e.g., don't insert timestamps), you should be able to take a consistent sha256sum of the build. And maybe even ZIP it up like a JAR and pass around a lightweight, source-only file that can compile and run (without a network connection) on other computers with the same kernel version.
Again, Bazel is basically this already. But it would be nice to have something like OP's tool to integrate in other build systems.
I could just make a Dockerfile and say that's my build system. But then I'm stuck with Docker. The only way to run my program would be through Docker. Docker doesn't have a monopoly on the idea of a fully-realized chroot.
Again, Bazel is basically this already. But it would be nice to have something like OP's tool to integrate in other build systems.
I could just make a Dockerfile and say that's my build system. But then I'm stuck with Docker. The only way to run my program would be through Docker. Docker doesn't have a monopoly on the idea of a fully-realized chroot.