HN user
Nope, it was over email.
I can point you at the various fixes for things I've reported since this first became available, but given your skepticism I'm sure it would not help since he seems to exclusively use the changeset description: "[add] various fixes" with no attribution.
Here's the link for that last bit: https://git.alpinelinux.org/cgit/alpine-secdb/log/
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
When I have reached out to ncopa to report issues in their feed he responded:
the secdb has so far been an experiment, but seems like people are actually using it, so I should set up some proper automated testing.
I doubt there is a better source :)
Alpine is built around musl libc, which has numerous compatibility differences from a traditional glibc: http://wiki.musl-libc.org/wiki/Functional_differences_from_g...
Some folks solve this by adding glibc to Alpine (IIUC this is what Envoy is building upon).
It has a package manager, but it is far from as comprehensive. The security database is still essentially an experiment with much less richness than Ubuntu, Debian, Redhat, ...
If what you want is a package manager, you probably want minideb from the Bitnami folks.
Yeah, that's exactly why we chose to start from debs.
Right, "nothing else" = "FROM scratch".
In the talk, I call this "FROM scratch -- for the rest of us."
That a half-truth because this also tries to set up a minimal compatible environment for common cases, e.g. it sets up ca-certs, a /tmp directory, and an /etc/passwd file.
The video explains why. The goal isn't small, it's minimal.
By pursuing small at the expense of compatibility we got things like musl libc (which has tons of compat issues).
If all we wanted was small we could have started from musl libc and unpacked alpine packages the way we unpack debs.