Re: Docker and singularity containers

[Ricardo Wurmus]

Hi Pjotr,

>> 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.

Yes, I agree, though it may be useful to have an image containing a
comprehensive environment for bioinformatics analysis with R, containing
commonly used bioconductor packages; or an image with the full
scientific Python stack.

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

Right.  In the meantime we may want to discuss how to implement this.
Could it just be done as a specification for the Guix CI?  Since this
should not be stealing resources from the build farm and thus should run
on a separate system, how can we make sure that it only builds packs
from packages for which we already have substitutes on the build farm?

I would gladly host a prototype of a system like this.

--
Ricardo