On Thu, Feb 05, 2026 at 07:03:01PM +0100, Simon Josefsson via Development of GNU Guix and the GNU System distribution. wrote: > All, > > I'd like to see "official" Guix container images, and would like to > explore what the process towards that would be. I maintain a set of > container images at https://gitlab.com/debdistutils/guix/container but > that is just one third-party contribution, and probably not directly > suitable to bless as official images (but I could be wrong). > > Some steps: > > 1) Is there agreement that the Guix project should publish official > container images at all? Any objections? Assuming we can decide on all > the details, of course. (...)
Containers are widely used by users running application servers so it seems justified. I wouldn't see much point in doing it with all our desktop stuff in it. The big thing is having a 'Team' that's going to be able to commit to working on this consistently. There were a lot of different installer options that we published in the 1.4.0 time-frame, but when I looked at 1.5.0 most of them hadn't been maintained. That's not much of a problem for a one-off installer image for a dev motherboard, but it will cause issues for containers. I think you need a new team, or an existing team takes responsibility, and there has to be at least one committer in the team. > 2) I'm not that familiar with the Guix project build system, but I > suppose the images should be built by centralized by it? Is this > feasible? What would be involved in making that happen? > > 3) Agreement that images should be generated by 'guix pack -f docker'. > Any alternative? > There's been a strong desire for automation in the project so yes. Also, most users will want the 'latest' version of a 'container' since they'll re-roll the base-container quite often. > 6) It would be useful to publish images for a recent 'master' commit but > also for the Guix v1.5.0 release commit -- which ought to be forever > bit-by-bit identical once prepared (or?) -- and for future releases. > I expect you'll want both. Given that guix pull takes a really long time I would expect that users that deploy to 'production' would use the latest commit on master. It's good to have the release commit as a separate one. > 7) How are they distributed? I suppose the images could be published on > gnu.org/gnu/guix/ but the container-way is via some public container > registry. Docker Hub is well-known, but there are many other. I'm not > sure if Codeberg offers one. What are the concerns here? > > What do you think? Other concerns? (...) According to the Codeberg documentation OCI containers can be published: https://forgejo.org/docs/latest/user/packages/ I can see the 'package' link on the Guix organisation - it's pretty hidden, so I wouldn't expect many users to know about it. We could link from the Guix download page as well. The main concern for me about Docker Hub is I don't know what their policies are these days. As long as there's no charge for distribution? Steve / Futurile
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