Re: Docker and singularity containers

[Pjotr Prins]

On Wed, Sep 12, 2018 at 07:43:42PM +0200, Ricardo Wurmus wrote:
> 
> Ludovic Courtès <address@hidden> writes:
> 
> > A while back we fantasized about the possibility of having a web service
> > that would produce “packs” of Guix packages on demand.  That may allow
> > us to be #1 on HN for a couple of hours ;-), but it would also be quite
> > resource-hungry (and the service itself needs to be written to begin
> > with.)  Such a service would have to use its own resources IMO, not
> > those of the build farm, which is already busy enough.
> 
> My research group was interested in a service just like that, actually.
> After having connected the external storage directly to the
> berlin.guixsd.org we have a new server that could be used solely for
> this purpose.

Demand there is for sure! And these infrastructures are only
expanding.

> But even this may not be enough for an on-demand service.  It might,
> however, be enough for a service that regularly builds packs for certain
> common environments from packages the build farm has already built.
> 
> (This would be done with the squashfs backend, which is way faster than
> the Docker backend.)

Also my original comment said to have a limited number of packages to
expose. I mean command line tools make sense and dedicated
environments. But we don't need an image for every R, Ruby and Python
package.

We should just compile a meta list of those. And if someone requests
one we add it. 


Pj.