You don't need a package manager in your production container, you need one for the dependencies to build your artifact (in previous stages) which gets passed on, on it's own, statically compiled, to the empty container.
And I need a tool chain for inspecting a sick container trying to figure out why CPU jumped 25% for no apparent reason.
Also some programming languages, you can’t really populate the app’s dependencies without a bunch of its dependencies. And the only way to split the difference means you have to memorize every file that gets created during the build/install process to be sure you don’t miss anything airlifting them from one container to another.
All of which amounts to me becoming the package manager. Which gets much less fun the more containers you have running in prod.
I generally respect the curation that alpine does. Not too old, not too bleeding edge.
