yade-dev team mailing list archive

[Gael Lorieul <gael.lorieul@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

Hi Jérome and Janek!

Jerome Duriez said:     (by the date of Fri, 5 Jul 2019 17:03:45)
 > I actually just understood more (hopefully) what these dockers are..
 > And I just realized the docker files like this one
 > <https://gitlab.com/yade-dev/docker-yade/blob/ubuntu16-py3/Dockerfile>
 > are up-to-date lists of required packages for the different OS
 > (are they ?),

On 05-07-19 11:24, Janek Kozicki wrote:
 > yes!

One of the core principles of Docker files are that they are read by a 
sort of virtual machine (emulates an OS) than runs the code in a 
sandbox. I'm not sure how important running things in a sandbox or 
emulating another OS is for Yade? At the UCLouvain we were using docker 
as part of a solution to grade students' programs (Python scripts) by 
running unit tests on them. Running in a sandbox was important  because 
it reduced the risk of the system being attacked by malicious scripts 
(those naughty, naughty students!), or students trying to cheat by 
accessing and interacting with grading software.

If you just want to have control on the dependencies by shipping them 
along with the software, an AppImage is perhaps more appropriate? By 
bundling dependencies, the software becomes a lot more portable and can 
be used on any linux distribution. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AppImage

An example of software packaged as an AppImage is Avidemux or FreeCAD: 
give it a go if you want to see how it feels from a user's perspective! 
;) It's actually astonishingly simple!!
http://fixounet.free.fr/avidemux/
https://freecadweb.org/downloads.php

But perhaps I misunderstood the needs of the Yade developpers…

Gaël