This seems smarter than some of the container OS approaches that start from distros that have weak or no package management, and rely entirely on the "container" model to provide updates and some combination of spit and duct tape to build them. There's a smallish Fedora for containers (exists in the Docker registry) as well; it's about 70MB, which is still a little beefy.

Anybody know how big minideb is?

Edit: zwerdids posted that it's ~50MB so a wee bit smaller than the currently commonly used Fedora container image. And an order of magnitude bigger than an Alpine image.