[Chicago-talk] Alpine Linux distribution

[James E Keenan]

Sean Blanton,

You wrote in an earlier message to this group,

"The Alpine Linux distribution is popular to keep the [Docker] image 
size down."

Can you elaborate on this?

I ask, not because I know anything about Docker, but because over the 
past year or so, the Perl 5 Porters have had to contend with bug tickets 
or smoke-test failure reports coming from Alpine Linux users/machines. 
It's difficult for us to diagnose/resolve these problems unless we have 
contributors who (generally for business or personal reasons) are 
running Alpine Linux.  I myself have never run Alpine Linux, know 
nothing about it besides what I read on Wikipedia, and am rather clumsy 
at sys-admining various platforms.

So, apart from the fact that "... Alpine uses musl and BusyBox instead 
of the more commonly used Glibc and GNU Core Utilities and OpenRC for 
its init system instead of systemd" 
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alpine_Linux), can you say something 
about the Alpine/Docker interaction ... or anything else that Perl users 
on other Linux distros should know?

Thank you very much.
Jim Keenan