Re: official Emacs Docker image

[Ted Zlatanov]

On Thu, 12 Nov 2015 17:31:58 -0500 Richard Stallman <address@hidden> wrote: 

>> 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.

RS> Anyone is free, and welcome, to use our packages this way.  The one
RS> concern I have about it is that using Docker (the server) for this is SaaSS.

Understood.

RS> If we want to do testing using Docker (the software), we should write 
something
RS> that quickly and easily configures Docker (the software) on any machine,
RS> rather than recommending people use Docker (the server).

Yup. That's what I'd like to do. Setting up an Emacs image is easy in
itself, you write a Dockerfile which is sort of a shell script for
building Docker images. The output is a binary artifact.

I would probably set up multiple builds (which the Docker Hub provides
as a free service) for several platforms, so pulling
emacs-official:debian would get an image of Emacs running in Debian, for
instance. That's the part where it's nice to use the Docker Hub service;
it doesn't provide anything that can't be done locally but it simplifies
automated builds, and provides convenient central searching and storage
for many people.

The key thing is to make the image "official" so it's trusted by Docker
Hub users and has a top-level namespace. That will increase the
popularity of the image. I think this is important because there are
other GNU packages, such as GCC linked above, that are "official" and
only seem to be maintained by Docker Inc. staff (see
https://github.com/docker-library/gcc for the history of the GCC
official image).

I recommend creating a FSF/GNU organization on Docker Hub, which can
then be joined by interested contributors and can streamline this work.
Contributing individually won't scale.

On Thu, 12 Nov 2015 23:49:52 +0800 Nic Ferrier <address@hidden> wrote: 

NF> I made one though. I use it to host marmalade.

Could you point me to it? I looked and found nothing.

Thanks!
Ted