Hi, I wanted to discuss whether it will be a good idea to create a base docker image and then check that out every time we wish to use docker. The main reason behind the request is that the initial startup time to build a docker time will go down significantly ( from the present 20 ish minutes). This will help when we have a pre-commit bot since the startup time will reduce significantly since the overall startup time is low. I know the docker machine is cached for a period of time, however, our docker image itself doesn't change a lot, but building a new one takes a large amount of time due to the diverse nature of the project.
I suggest that we use the base debian image we use, install the dependencies we install at every run https://github.com/apache/avro/blob/master/share/docker/Dockerfile#L28-L38. We push this to a central repository, something like docker hub. We don't have any source code present so we don't need to worry about having unreleased code in the open. We can still have the apt-update and apt-get update <packages> step present which will allow us to update to the latest version of any package we might have missed. On a six month/year routine we can update the docker image if there are a lot of updates on the image. We will need some committer who can actually push the final image to the docker-hub. I can help in creating the image and providing the same. Your comments are appreciated. -Suraj Acharya
