On 14 January 2016 at 15:18, C. Titus Brown <[email protected]> wrote: > > (Agree with most of this; I'm just hesitant to say anything nice about > ugly heavy binary images :)
I think everyone is a little bit hesitant to say anything nice about ugly heavy binary images. And I think part of that stems from the fact that the things we do really do depend on a whole load of ugly heavy things. And the way to capture that is to capture a whole load of ugly heavy binary things. We're reluctant to face the reality. When we try and optimise that (by say, a Dockerfile, or a list of conda package versions) we're building a model, and we're saying, at least implicitly, I don't care about various minor uninteresting things (for example that security updates change the exact set of files that are "ubuntu:14.04"). Of course, a binary VM image or the nested tar files of a Docker image are only a model too. I can easily write a script whose output depends on the CPU ID of the CPU in my laptop. Clearly that's never going to be reproducible. I think it's useful to bear in mind that to some extent reproducibility is a modelling exercise. "All models are wrong but some are useful" - George Box drj _______________________________________________ Discuss mailing list [email protected] http://lists.software-carpentry.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss_lists.software-carpentry.org
