Does it make sense to publish Docker images?

[Carter12s]

The Dockerfile for this project is pretty good and pretty clean, but lots of folks who use docker don't know a lot about building images. Would be a better onboarding experience if we had some ready to go docker images published: rclrs-iron-1.71, rclrs-humble-1.71, etc.

[maspe36]

Do any other rcl libraries do this? I couldn't find anything for rclcpp on docker hub

[Carter12s]

Not that I'm aware of, and this is probably mostly just coming from my development style at the moment.

I was surprised (not in a bad way), that the CI jobs for this repo were installing a lot of the dependencies for each job. For roslibrust, I built docker images with ROS + Rust installed in them so that CI didn't have to install everything every time. Probably an unnecessary optimization, but doing it this way also enabled setting up .devcontainers with Github and a an easy "Getting Started" workflow for the crate.

https://github.com/Carter12s/roslibrust

I don't dislike the way this crate is handling it, and it is nice of this crate to provide a Dockerfile, but it would take very little to add a CI job that builds and publishes this crate's docker image. Currently, I think while there is a Dockerfile we don't have any automated testing around it?