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It's a different operating system. You can't point at a dockerfile, say "port this please from linux-such-and-such to FreeBSD" and expect it to work every time. There are nuances even with linux-compat.

Contrary to popular belief load-balance/scaleout is orthogonal to containers (and k8s is only one of the ways to go about it), so obviously it's not discussed in an article about containers.

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Very often you can, or could, because the software is portable (e.g. Node or Python or Postgres), and / or platform-independent (e.g. written in JS, Python, bash, etc).

In my practice it was completely normal to build things inside a container to be deployed on Linux using the same sources and basically the same package names and versions as used on a developer macOS machine (which is BSD-like enough down below).

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> macOS machine (which is BSD-like enough down below)

That's like saying an Ubuntu .deb will work on Gentoo because it's all Linux anyway. It's not that simple. There is dependencies and there are differences in the packages, package managers and surrounding system for a reason. It's not 1:1. Perhaps the naming scheme happened to line up for the packages you where using, but this should be considered not assumed.

It would be nice if there was some sort of translator that could handle "most common cases". I think it would improve the usability of Jails. Perhaps that would require someone to keep a list of packages mapping certain packages between operating systems.

Something like "apt install python3-serial" -> "pkg install py311-pyserial" may suffice.

For anyone that would use something like that, you should implement a prototype, publish it and perhaps someone else will build upon what you started!

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> It's not that simple.

It would tremendously benefit almost everyone if it were.

> There is dependencies and there are differences in the packages, package managers and surrounding system for a reason.

Yeah, the NIH syndrome. And sometimes, of course, there are decent technical reasons as well.

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