Hi Neels,
In any case, I would like to include you in the discussion, and maybe you would also like to be involved in maturing the idea?
Thanks and sure, I already excitingly read mails with similar topics like lxc and Jenkins YAML jobs. The latter will be commented soon.
This line fetches the given URL (in this case the latest patch on that branch) and considers the docker image as unchanged if that URL shows the same as last time. As soon as a new patch shows, things are rebuilt.
Great idea! So, the hourly/nightly jobs would "docker build..." instead of "docker run..."?
Will there be one Dockerfile per each branch or is planned to use docker's "ARG and "--build-arg" to pass branch while building?
Furthermore, the nightly package of libosmocore-dev confuses me, especially when thinking about gerrit jobs. How often are these packages updated?
In this sense we could have docker images cascading on top of each other, adding individual dependencies and reusing identical states auto-detected by docker. All build steps would be in the Dockerfile.
Afaiu images will be rebuild if a new patch is introduced. But who is invoking the rebuild when the parent or libosmocore-dev in the example have changed?
Sharing same layer for "RUN apt-get install ..." command as shown in osmo-nitb-master and osmo-bts-master Dockerfile could be promising. But only if above mentioned rebuilding mechanism is smart enough to build only one image first so following will reuse its layer.
In general I like the "move" towards docker compared to lxc, which does not provide something similar to a Dockerfile.
On the one hand the described (free) benefits sounds really promising. On the other hand I am skeptic about the whole life cycle, which imo needs some external management as described to keep everything up to date. Additionally, every "docker run ..." command would need a "docker pull ..." before to ensure latest image from repository.
I will definitely setup some build jobs on my Jenkins with those Docker images to get a better understanding.
P.S.: >> I feel a bit bad for accepting your contributions, doing review and keeping you busy
No worries at all! :)