Alpine

[varyumin]

Please will create a base image on Linux Alpine, because now your image very fat >500MB

[arjenderijke]

It is an interesting idea and worth investigating, because it is a rather large image. But two important remarks:

• At the moment, MonetDB is not tested on Alpine and it is not necessarily trivial to get MonetDB fully supported there. Apart from getting it to run, we need to maintain a repository with packages and setup the testing. But i will look into Alpine and getting MonetDB to run on it.
• It is true that using a different base image will reduce the size of the docker image, but the result of replacing the base image might disappoint you. I will have to check the actual sizes, but MonetDB itself is not very small and there are also several dependencies that take up lots of space, especially R. And since the original purpose of this image was to demonstrate the MonetDB and R integration, we cannot reduce the image by removing these dependencies.

[arjenderijke]

A first set of tests confirms that it will not be trivial to get MonetDB running on Alpine linux. I was able to bootstrap the source, but the configure fails because of missing packages. However i cannot install them because of version conflicts. And i have not found the right way yet to fix this on Alpine.

But after getting the configure phase to work, the "make" phase will likely contain additional problems. First, alpine uses relatively "old" version of certain software, while the main development platform for MonetDB is Fedora, which uses much later versions. And secondly, Alpine uses different (= lightweight) implementations of certain libraries, specifically libc and openssl. This might also be problematic when compiling the code.

To be continued.