deterministic builds? pdebuild. mock. this exists since practically forever.
as far as the "stateless" thing, this could have been explained in a far simple manner IMO.
1) No library deps:
"all system packages are installed in /mystuff/version/ with all their libs, then symlinked to /usr/bin so that we have no dependencies" (that's not new either but it never took off on linux)
2) fewer config deps
"only 4 variables can change the state of a config mgmt system's module, those are used to know if a daemon should restart for example"
So yeah. it's actually not stateless. And hey, stateless is not necessarily better. It's just less complicated (and potentially less flexible for the config mgmt part).
Might be why the author took so long to explain it without being too clear.
as far as the "stateless" thing, this could have been explained in a far simple manner IMO.
1) No library deps:
"all system packages are installed in /mystuff/version/ with all their libs, then symlinked to /usr/bin so that we have no dependencies" (that's not new either but it never took off on linux)
2) fewer config deps "only 4 variables can change the state of a config mgmt system's module, those are used to know if a daemon should restart for example"
So yeah. it's actually not stateless. And hey, stateless is not necessarily better. It's just less complicated (and potentially less flexible for the config mgmt part).
Might be why the author took so long to explain it without being too clear.