Hi. Yes, we fully intend to open up access to the build tool here. The build file you see is a new format that we've built to be able to do reproducible builds. It's a new frontend on top of buildkit so you can use it with docker build. The team is currently working hard to provide access to this tooling which will enable you to create, build and modify the images in your environment. We just need a couple more days for this to be available.
You do not need a custom buildkit frontend to do reproducible builds with any modern container build system, including docker.
Vanilla docker/buildkit works just fine as we use it in Stagex with just makefiles and Containerfiles which makes it super easy for anyone to reproduce our images with identical digests, and audit the process. The only thing non default we do to docker is have it use the containerd backend that comes with docker distributions since that allows for deterministic digests without pushing to a registry. This lets us have the same digests across all registries.
Additionally our images are actually container native meaning they are "from scratch" all the way down avoiding any trust in upstream build systems like Debian or Alpine or any of their non deterministic package management schemes or their single-point-of-failure trust in individual maintainers.
We will also be moving to LLVM native builds shortly removing a lot of the complexity with multi-arch images for build systems. Easily cross compile all the things from one image.
Honestly we would not at all be mad if Docker just white labeled these as official images as our goal is just to move the internet away from risky and difficult to audit supply chains as opposed to the "last mile" supply chain integrity that is the norm in all other solutions today.
