I've tried and failed a couple times to make Debian packages. The system is so old and crufty, writing a dockerfile is an order of magnitude simpler and there are lots of useful examples and tutorials that were written more recently than 20 years ago.
> I've tried and failed a couple times to make Debian packages.
That's a real problem. Distributions have really dropped the ball here (to varying degrees).
But there's a big difference between "Docker is $distribution_package_manager done right!" and "Docker at least sucks less than the alternatives".
The tradeoff when packaging via Docker is often in integration with other facilities provided by the OS. Some of the hassles of packaging for a native OS package manager are senseless, bad UX to be sure. But others are there for a reason: how to integrate with init systems, standard directory locations, shared cache locations, or (god forbid) desktop/windowing systems? If your answer to those is "fuck it, use Docker", you often end up with a user experience akin to driving a portable mobile home down a small city street: technically fits and obeys traffic patterns, but doesn't behave in a way that anyone who has lived there for awhile expects it to.
> But others are there for a reason: how to integrate with init systems, standard directory locations, shared cache locations, or (god forbid) desktop/windowing systems?
Having tried (and succeed) many times in making Debian packages, I can attest to the value of these "hassles" and ones like them.
Much of the value is just in making sure one thinks about that whole breadth of issues and how they'll affect your environment. You may decide that a particular hassle actually is too much effort for not enough benefit, but at least the decision is conscious and, if it "bites" you later, you know where/how to go back and change things.
Additional value can come from all the taken-for-granted work that's been done over those past 20 years. Need multiple versions of something installed at the same time? Maybe the distro people already have a standard way to do that.
Of course, all of this value can only be obtained after a remarkably huge up-front investment of learning, and, from what I recall, already knowing RPM didn't substantially lessen that load when learning debianization. It's tough to fault the attitude of "fuck it, use Docker for packaging" (for any value of "Docker", including "tarball", "pip", "npm", etc) for anyone whose career isn't Ops.
