<i>&quot;The container tools I&#x27;m working on are completely declarative.  No imperative Dockerfiles!  This means that you don&#x27;t have to worry about order of operations, something that you have to think about constantly when using Docker, especially when trying to maximize the use of the image cache.&quot;</i><p>Sometimes you actually need or want something to be done before something else, though.  I&#x27;m wondering how Guix deals with that, or if it&#x27;s capable of dealing with that.<p>I&#x27;ve been bitten many times by Puppet&#x27;s default lack of order in its declarative manifests.  What was vaunted to be an advantage turned out to be a curse when you actually do want&#x2F;need them to be in order.<p>I hope Guix does a better job at this than Puppet.