Slim / alpine versions?

[jimhester]

Docker has official 'slim' runtimes for a number of programming languages, e.g. python:slim and ruby:slim. It might be useful to provide a similar thing for R also based on debian:buster-slim.

Similarly a distribution based on alpine linux might be useful to the community, as using alpine is pretty popular due to its small size.

[maxheld83]

if anyone else is looking for such pretty small / alpine-based images, there's https://github.com/r-hub/r-minimal.

[JosiahParry]

+1 for support for alpine linux a-la r-minimal.

[gaborcsardi]

@JosiahParry What is missing from https://github.com/r-hub/r-minimal that you would like to see in the rstudio/r-base images?

[JosiahParry]

@gaborcsardi not too much! Mostly convenience. The primary things that prevent me from using r-minimal for Docker images is that it's unclear how to identify and programmatically define sys-reqs in the Docker image. Additionally, support for binaries via P3M instead of reliance on installr would be most desirable

[gaborcsardi]

@JosiahParry This repo is not about sysreqs, and it is also not about P3M, though.

[JosiahParry]

Sorry, bout that! What I would like to see in the rstudio/r-base is an alpine tag with associated R versions. This way I can rely on a single docker hub image source.