Are the images still considered 'experimental'?

[nejch]

Thanks for publishing these images @nikolaik. Seems like they get quite a lot of pulls (10M+) and are sometimes used as a base for images built by established orgs - for example, in https://github.com/sourcegraph/scip-python.

But there's this:

This is experimental and might break from time to time. Use at your own risk!

I see this was added 6 years ago when the readme was first added. Is this still considered true or was that just at the start?

Edit: I just noticed #43 - this would possibly ensure some kind of stability as well.

[nikolaik]

Thanks for the nudge on this @nejch. I belive we can say that after 4 years, some of the experimental bits of this repo has gone away. The disclaimer was copied over from https://github.com/beevelop/docker-nodejs-python which I used as a basis back in the day.

Now that you mention it, there are a few things we could do before removing the disclaimer, in sinking priority:

• Support multiarch build to fix arm64 Support! #38
• Add simple smoke tests for each build image Smoke tests #48
• Refactor the CI build scripts a bit more, since have grown out of their much smaller scope.
• Setup a versioning scheme to solve Releases with changelog #43 I'm thinking https://calver.org/ is a good fit for this project.

What do you think?

[nejch]

Thanks for all the follow-up issues @nikolaik. If I find some time I can try to take a look as well eventually :)

Calver makes sense to me, would those be reflected in the docker tags? I guess the loose flavors from https://hub.docker.com/r/nikolaik/python-nodejs would then still be present, e.g something like nikolaik/python-nodejs:2022.01.10-python3.10-nodejs18 ?

[nejch]

Hey @nikolaik, you might see a bit more activity from me in the near future to tackle some of the issues above. It might help our organization avoid maintaining some internal images.

One question/suggestion, and not quite sure how to approach it as Docker images are not easily migrated. Your image is by far the most popular/downloaded node+python image that I could find. But it being published in a personal namespace makes some people a bit wary of using it as opposed to those from organizations.

Have you considered making or transferring to a dedicated namespace (at least on GitHub) where there might be other maintainers? I'm not sure if there's an existing umbrella org for Docker images like that, similar to e.g. github.com/psf, github.com/pytest-dev etc.

I realize rebuilding an image continuously doesn't take that much work as you've been building this successfully for years. But I guess mostly it's also about optics and the "only maintainer just suddenly disappeared" scenarios :)