Buildkit is still a separate system, unlike the old builder. So you get that extra step of importing the result back.

And since it's a separate system, there are also these strange limitations. For example, I can't just cache pre-built images in an NFS directory and then just push them into the Buildkit context. There's simply no command for it. Buildkit can only pull them from a registry.

> Buldkit is far more efficient than the old model.

I've yet to see it work faster than podman+buildah. And it's also just plain buggy. Caching for multi-stage and/or parallel builds has been broken since the beginning. The Docker team just ignores it and closes the bugs: https://github.com/moby/buildkit/issues/1981 https://github.com/moby/buildkit/issues/2274 https://github.com/moby/buildkit/issues/2279

I understand why. I tried to debug it, and simply getting it running under a debugger is an adventure.

So far, I found that switching to podman+podman-compose is a better solution. At least my brain is good enough to understand them completely, and contribute fixes if needed.