I ditched Docker for Podman

Both podman and docker have pretty poor error handling in my experience. It depends on the error, but for me it often comes down to a docker compose misconfiguration, resource, permissions, etc. In docker always find the errors quite difficult to trace back to root cause. In podman you get a python a stack trace. I wish both projects would assert different assumptions/requirements at runtime and report errors/warnings in a human-readable way.

Do you have an example?

BTW, undrstandable to not have an example on the spot.

In general we do actually try to provide full context for errors from dockerd. Some things can be cryptic because, frankly, they are cryptic and require digging into what really happened (typical of errors from runc), but we do tend to wrap things so at least you know where the call site was.

There's also tracing data you can hook into, which could definitely be improved (some legacy issues around context propagation that need to be solved).

I've definitely seen, in the past, my fair share of errors that simply say "invalid argument" (typically this is a kernel message) without any context but have worked to inject context everywhere or do better at handling errors that we can.

So definitely interested in anything you've seen that could be improved because no one likes to get an error message that you can't understand.