Oh. I didn't consider the economic side of it :)

We can also make the base docker image ourselves. Here is a simple tutorial. So, instead of giving a link that is already available, one can use the code below:

FROM scratch

Is this going to help?

You can host a personal docker repository like dockerhub. Quote from https://docs.docker.com/registry/

= What Is It =

The Registry is a stateless, highly scalable server side application that stores and lets you distribute Docker images. The Registry is open-source, under the permissive Apache license.

= Why Use It =

You should use the Registry if you want to:

• tightly control where your images are being stored
• fully own your images distribution pipeline
• integrate image storage and distribution tightly into your in-house development workflow

I found this solution in this stackoverflow question: how to share my docker image without using the dockerhub

Building Maneage within a Docker image can simplify moving a built project from one computer to another immediately without having to built it from scratch. Therefore README.md has a special section to build the project in a Docker image.

However, currently README.md recommends to use the 'debian:stable-slim' image as its base. As mentioned throughout the Maneage paper, this changes all the frequently. Ideally that change should not cause any problem for Maneage, because Maneage builds everything itself (except for the C library, which will be done in task #15390).

The actual file that gets downloaded for the slim Debian is very small (27.11 Mb right now). So instead of relying on Dockerhub and its links to Debian's servers, we can just keep that file ourselves on Zenodo. That file can then be the recommended base image for building Maneage in a container. We can update it every few years (when Debian stable gets updated).

But to be able to build Maneage, we also need the Debian 'gcc', 'g++' and 'wget' packages. So the very top of our recommended Dockerfile looks something like this:

FROM debian:stable-slim
RUN apt-get update && apt-get install -y gcc g++ wget

I see two ways to do this:

1. In our archival, we can also store all the '.deb' files of these packages and their dependencies and use them instead of Debian's own server.

2. We build a new custom Docker image that blends in the slim image and the image with the compilers and wget into one core image and archives that on Zenodo (it shouldn't be larger than 300 Mb, and can be updated every 2 years!). I just had a fast search and apparently Docker supports this with its multistaged builds.

I currently prefer the second one because it is more simpler/cleaner for ourselves and the users (we will store the Dockerfile that is used to create it with the image). But please let me know what you think.