Build and release cross compiled binaries

[hferentschik]

Given that this is a generic CLI for dealing with images, it would be nice to be able to download cross compiled binaries in order to quickly evaluate the tool.

I am on OS X and it seems I can currently not build from master. How can I use/evaluate skopeo?

[mtrmac]

Thanks for your interest.

If skopeo does not build on OS X, we couldn't really publish a compiled binary for OS X even if there were a release process for that.

On Linux, the standard workflow would be to rely on a distribution packaging the software. Hooking up Travis to publish the test binaries somewhere might be interesting, regardless, though it’s not immediately obvious where to host it with minimal overhead. https://docs.travis-ci.com/user/deployment/releases/ might be a starting point, but

Please note that deploying GitHub Releases works only for tags, not for branches.

Contributions for either making OS X buildable, or for an automated publish workflow, would be welcome, of course.

What build failure have you encountered, exactly? It might be already tracked in #310.

FWIW #310 suggests that older versions do build on OS X, that might be usable for a minimal proof of concept.

[mtrmac]

See also #310 (comment) .

[jorgemoralespou]

@mtrmac @runcom is there any priority for this?

[mtrmac]

To the best of my knowledge (which is only based on second-hand feedback in #310), skopeo should be buildable.

As for hosting a compiled binary somewhere, that’s not likely to happen without somebody figuring out where to build and host, and contributing the code to do that.

[hferentschik]

To the best of my knowledge (which is only based on second-hand feedback in #310), skopeo should be buildable.

For all I can tell there are still various issues (but I will need to catch up on things over the next days), but the issue itself is still that one does not want to compile the sources to try skopeo. It is a quite high hurdle to jump. I think you get much better adoption if you provide a binary, if nothing else for Linux at least.

As for hosting a compiled binary somewhere, that’s not likely to happen without somebody figuring out where to build and host,

Hosting can be easily done on GitHub itself. Just put it onto the release page. Many projects do it this way.

Regarding building, pick any of the OpenSource CI systems, for example Travis CI. Or I am pretty sure that you can also get onto CentOS CI.

That said, for an actual release you most likely want to build and cross compile locally and then upload to the GitHub release page. There are tools which can help with that (gh-release for example).

[rhatdan]

@mtrmac @vrothberg Is this something we want? Should we put an intern on it?

[mtrmac]

It might be useful for macOS (unlike Linux, where a single binary does not quite make sense due to NSS ABI issues, but tracked in #594 anyway); it would strongly be related to the tentative discussions about replace Travis CI with something else.

Meanwhile, there is a skopeo formula in Homebrew, which is the 99% solution; so, an extra official build in this repository seems quite low-priority; we’d probably do more good by ensuring the Homebrew formula is updated as part of the release process.

[mtrmac]

For the record, there’s also #391 with a fair bit of overlap.

[rhatdan]

Closing since #391 covers this.