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What is Debian?
Debian is an operating system which is composed primarily of free and open-source software, most of which is under the GNU General Public License, and developed by a group of individuals known as the Debian project. Debian is one of the most popular Linux distributions for personal computers and network servers, and has been used as a base for several other Linux distributions.
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About this image
The %%IMAGE%%:latest tag will always point the latest stable release (which is, at the time of this writing, %%IMAGE%%:stretch). Stable releases are also tagged with their version (ie, %%IMAGE%%:8 is an alias for %%IMAGE%%:jessie, %%IMAGE%%:7 is an alias for %%IMAGE%%:wheezy, etc).
The rolling tags (%%IMAGE%%:stable, %%IMAGE%%:testing, etc) use the rolling suite names in their /etc/apt/sources.list file (ie, deb http://deb.debian.org/debian testing main).
The mirror of choice for these images is the deb.debian.org CDN pointer/redirector so that it's as reliable as possible for the largest subset of users (and is also the default mirror for debootstrap as of 2016-10-20). See the deb.debian.org homepage for more information.
If you find yourself needing a Debian release which is EOL (and thus only available from archive.debian.org), you should check out the debian/eol image, which includes tags for Debian releases as far back as Potato (Debian 2.2), the first release to fully utilize APT.
Locales
Given that it is a faithful "minbase" install of Debian, this image only includes the C, C.UTF-8, and POSIX locales by default. For most uses requiring a UTF-8 locale, C.UTF-8 is likely sufficient (-e LANG=C.UTF-8 or ENV LANG C.UTF-8).
For uses where that is not sufficient, other locales can be installed/generated via the locales package. PostgreSQL has a good example of doing so, copied below:
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y locales && rm -rf /var/lib/apt/lists/* \
&& localedef -i en_US -c -f UTF-8 -A /usr/share/locale/locale.alias en_US.UTF-8
ENV LANG en_US.utf8
How It's Made
The rootfs tarballs for this image are built using the reproducible-Debian-rootfs tool, debuerreotype, with an explicit goal being that they are transparent and reproducible. Using the same toolchain, it should be possible to regenerate (clean-room!) the same tarballs used for building the official Debian images.
Additionally, the scripts in %%GITHUB-REPO%% are used to create each tag's Dockerfile and collect architecture-specific tarballs into a single place (for placement into dist-ARCH branches on the same repository, which also contain extra metadata about the artifacts included in each build, such as explicit package versions).