Re: Octave development daily snapshot service

[Colin Macdonald]

On 14/04/17 10:29 AM, Mike Miller wrote:
> All,
>
> I am maintaining a Docker instance that contains the latest development
> version of Octave running on Ubuntu 14.04 LTS.
>
> How to use:
>
> 1. docker run -it mtmiller/octave-snapshot
> 2. Use Octave however you need to
>
> I intend to keep this updated, ideally once a day, but for now it's
> whenever I have time to run the build scripts.
>
> This container will always track the head of the default branch, so
> there is of course no guarantee that things will not break or change
> suddenly. This is intended for development use, to test scripts,
> packages, or other projects against Octave as it is being developed.
> This is the purpose that I needed it for.
>
> I am open to suggestions, pull requests, ideas on how to improve or
> automate. Source is at https://github.com/mtmiller/octave-snapshot.

Thanks Mike, this certainly looks useful for continuous integration and 
other testing!

I tried the command you listed on Fedora 25 and it works (downloaded a 
pile of stuff, 5 Gib in /var/lib/docker, maybe normal when run on 
non-Ubuntu systems).

Comments:

1.  Doctest pkg: "pkg install -forge doctest" just worked!

2.  Symbolic pkg: I did "apt-get install python-pip", then "pip install 
sympy", then started octave and "pkg install -forge symbolic".   Works 
for me.

    2.a.  Is it worth including "pip" in the container?  (21 MiB)

3.  Might be helpful to Docker noobs (me) to add a link your short 
instructions enable X11 from (to?) the container.

4.  Is the host reasonably protected from root on the container?  I.e., 
safe-ish to run Octave as root?

thanks,
Colin