Re: Octave minimal virtual image for development

[Mike Miller]

On Wed, May 06, 2020 at 14:36:29 -0400, Nicholas Jankowski wrote:
> seeing the difficulties the potential GSOD student has mentioned, plus
> other conversations about difficulties on Mac, Windows, etc., a virtualbox
> or equivalent image has been suggested several times.

I maintain something like that for docker. Anyone interested can pull
and use

    docker run registry.gitlab.com/mtmiller/docker-octave-dev

to get a development environment that is ready to pull and build Octave
from source.

> What would a minimal virtual box image prepared to clone/setup an Octave
> development environment look like? would it be of a reasonable size to
> include on the download server alongside the binary installers?  I know a
> fully setup virtual image can be big, and there are limits to reasonable
> server storage space.  But what about something with the just OS set up and
> a set of scripts to set up the cloned source and whatever build
> dependencies are needed? Maybe some of those dependencies could be
> preinstalled in the image if they aren't too hefty?

I would be interested in learning how to build and maintain a vagrant VM
image (box) for Octave development, if that would be useful to some in
addition to the docker image. It would probably be a couple GB, hosted
on the vagrant cloud.

I don't need it now, but someday I may have interest in building and
maintaining an AWS AMI for the same purpose, so ping me if that
interests anyone as well. LXD image? Other formats / integrations?

> Or at that point would it be more trouble than it's worth?  But maybe
> that's too much handholding? Easier to just make a wiki instruction set for
> 'download vb' 'setup linux vm' 'follow linux build instructions',
> especially if you're targeting a potential developer? (I guess such a VM
> would be useful for those trying to run the latest & greatest version of
> Octave too.)

For me it's not entirely about handholding, it's about simple reusable
building blocks that serve many uses. For example, I maintain docker
images for Octave because I use them for CI/CD on my Octave packages and
test scripts. But I know there are other uses, and if other users find
them useful to quickly spin up a development environment, run a program
with the latest version, or some other purpose I haven't thought of yet,
that's great too.

-- 
mike

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