Our 2-stage build process uses Alpine Linux only as a build host. Once
we’ve got everything reduced to the two key static binaries — Fossil and
BusyBox — we throw all the rest of it away.

A secondary benefit falls out of this process for free: it’s arguably
the easiest way to build a purely static Fossil binary for Linux. Most
modern Linux distros make this surprisingly difficult, but Alpine’s
modern Linux distros make this [surprisingly difficult][lsl], but Alpine’s
back-to-basics nature makes static builds work the way they used to,
back in the day. If that’s all you’re after, you can do so as easily as
this:

```
  $ docker build -t fossil .
  $ docker create --name fossil-static-tmp fossil
  $ docker cp fossil-static-tmp:/jail/bin/fossil .
  $ docker container rm fossil-static-tmp
```

The resulting binary is the single largest file inside that container,
at about 6 MiB. (It’s built stripped.)

[lsl]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3430400/linux-static-linking-is-dead


## 5. <a id="args"></a>Container Build Arguments

### <a id="pkg-vers"></a> 5.1 Package Versions

You can override the default versions of Fossil and BusyBox that get