@andrew yeah I know what you mean. Well, there is no way to actually automate this (there is a package that can query package manager @posit but you can't really depends on that) but some strides have been made to make it easyer. Package manager is actually the most important a time saver and it will tell you the os deps. The way I do it is two docker files. One for apt and one with my app or pipeline, built from the former with renv cache shared amongst containers. It's documented and cool.