[Distutils] Idea: allow PyPI projects to link to DockerHub container images

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at gmail.com
Tue Feb 3 09:50:24 CET 2015


On 3 Feb 2015 18:36, "Ionel Cristian Mărieș" <contact at ionelmc.ro> wrote:
>
> Wouldn't this be a good time to discuss other types of URLs?
>
> Eg:
>
> * Documentation
> * CI status (in the many different flavors)
> * Issue tracker
> * Forum/mailing list
> * Support place
>
> After all, there's nothing special about docker images - every project is
going to have a different special thing at some URL.

That's already part of the proposed project metadata extension in PEP 459.

Cheers,
Nick.

>
>
> Thanks,
> -- Ionel Cristian Mărieș, blog.ionelmc.ro
>
> On Sun, Feb 1, 2015 at 2:43 AM, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> One of the recurring problems folks mention here is how to deal with
>> the complexities of handling Linux ABI compatibility issues.
>>
>> That's a genuinely hard problem, and not one that *anyone* has solved
>> well - it's one of the reasons being an independent software vendor
>> for Linux in general (rather than just certifying with the major
>> commercial distros) is a pain. When folks do it, they tend to take the
>> "bundle everything you need and drop it somewhere in /opt" approach
>> which (quite rightly) makes professional system administrators very
>> unhappy.
>>
>> On the distro side, this is one of the big factors driving the
>> popularity of the "bundle all the things" container image model: it
>> does the bundling in such a way that it's amenable to programmatic
>> introspection, and it still reduces the runtime ABI compatibility
>> question to just the kernel ABI. This tends to work really when in the
>> case of dynamic languages like Python, as the language runtime is
>> likely to deal with most kernel compatibility issues for you. (ABI
>> incompatibilities can still bite you if you're using system libraries
>> inside the container and your base image doesn't match your runtime
>> kernel, but the bug surface is still much smaller than when you use
>> the end user's system libraries directly)
>>
>> It seems to me that, at least for web services published via PyPI
>> (like Kallithea), "use our recommended container", is likely to be the
>> easiest way to get folks on Linux up and running quickly with the
>> service. Folks may still want to take the image apart later and roll
>> their own (e.g. to switch to running on a different web server or a
>> different base image), but they wouldn't have to do their own
>> integration work just to get started.
>>
>> The other advantage of nudging folks in the direction of Linux
>> containers to address their ABI compatibility woes is that this is
>> tech that already (mostly) works, and has a broader management
>> ecosystem growing around it (including both the major open source
>> platform-as-a-service offerings in OpenShift and Cloud Foundry).
>> Inventing our own way of abstracting away the Linux ABI compatibility
>> problem would be an awful lot of work, and likely leave us with an end
>> result that isn't pre-integrated with anything else.
>>
>> Regards,
>> Nick.
>>
>> P.S. Full disclosure: for Fedora's developer experience work for web
>> service developers, we're heading heavily in the direction of
>> containers+Vagrant for local dev workstations, to allow common dev
>> workflows across Linux, Mac OS X and Windows, and then pushing the
>> containers through Linux based CI and independent QE workflows, into
>> container based production Linux environments, including the Google &
>> Red Hat backed Kubernetes container orchestration framework and
>> OpenStack's Project Solum. In my day job, this is also the direction
>> we're taking Red Hat's internal infrastructure since it systematically
>> solves a variety of problems for us (like how to most effectively
>> allow folks to develop on Fedora while deploying on RHEL).
>>
>> --
>> Nick Coghlan   |   ncoghlan at gmail.com   |   Brisbane, Australia
>> _______________________________________________
>> Distutils-SIG maillist  -  Distutils-SIG at python.org
>> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/distutils-sig
>
>
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