> I would say that containers are the foundation of the practice of reproducible builds.
If you mean containers as in the isolation features that are utilised by docker et al. to provide their flavor of compartmentalization then yes, those are pretty useful for reproducibility (although not 100% necessary, I think).
If you mean containers as in a bundled linux userland (so, e.g. a docker container running some image) then no, that is entirely orthogonal to reproducibility, as demonstrated by nix and guix which AFAIK use the low-level isolation features for their build sanboxes but do not have anything resembling a container image involved.
If you mean containers as in the isolation features that are utilised by docker et al. to provide their flavor of compartmentalization then yes, those are pretty useful for reproducibility (although not 100% necessary, I think).
If you mean containers as in a bundled linux userland (so, e.g. a docker container running some image) then no, that is entirely orthogonal to reproducibility, as demonstrated by nix and guix which AFAIK use the low-level isolation features for their build sanboxes but do not have anything resembling a container image involved.