official Emacs Docker image (was: Automate Emacs UI testing?)

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Wed, 11 Nov 2015 18:27:27 -0500 Richard Stallman <address@hidden> wrote: 

RS> [[[ To any NSA and FBI agents reading my email: please consider    ]]]
RS> [[[ whether defending the US Constitution against all enemies,     ]]]
RS> [[[ foreign or domestic, requires you to follow Snowden's example. ]]]

RS> It appears that Docker and Sikuli are ok for us to use,
RS> if we want to.

There is no official Docker image for Emacs on the Docker Hub:

https://hub.docker.com/search/?q=emacs&page=1&isAutomated=0&isOfficial=0&starCount=0&pullCount=0

I think it would be very useful to make an official image and link it to
Git so it builds automatically. It would make it easy to automate some
types of tests, but it would also be a convenient way for users to run a
very recent Emacs without downloading all the required libraries and
building it locally. It would be good to make images with several
platforms for testing, but for users I imagine a simple Debian image
would fit most needs.

Another interesting use case is running the daemon in a disposable and
theoretically isolated container.

John and Richard, the only issue I can see there is that the GNU Project
may wish to maintain their own Docker image repository. Because there
are already some official images from GNU packages on the Docker Hub
such as https://hub.docker.com/_/gcc/ though, I assume this is OK. You
can see all the official images at
https://github.com/docker-library/official-images/tree/master/library

If you decide to pursue the official repo path, you can see the
instructions at https://docs.docker.com/docker-hub/official_repos/
require a single author. In the Emacs case, I didn't want to start the
process myself because it's probably better to create a shared
authorship, but am happy to contribute a Dockerfile and anything else
needed.

Ted