Add deprecation warning to apk-install

[progrium]

Proposal to deprecate apk-install now that there is an official alpine Docker image that does not include this helper script. Dropping apk-install will encourage more consistent usage of the canonical method of installing packages. It minimizes the differences between official and Glider Labs images, which is good for (new) users and good for maintainers.

This also puts pressure on a more proper solution to removing the cache, such as adding a --no-cache option to apk add upstream, as opposed to maintaining a minimal script in a non-official image.

[progrium]

No comments? Should we merge this?

[andyshinn]

Can you remove apk-install from the docs? If it is going to be deprecated then we shouldn't mention it.

[progrium]

👍

[JeanMertz]

Not sure why we should learn the canonical way to install packages. If that's the reason, we could also remove the package manager and learn how to compile from source (exaggerating here).

I'm a big fan of apk-install, instead of apk add --update <packages> && rm -rf /var/cache/apk/*, and was looking forward to more snippets in this repo to simplify package management and/or other routinely used tasks.

In the same vein, we created blendle/docker-base to help us extract common tasks to a higher level.

Obviously, we can simply move this to our own repo, but just voicing my opinion here that apk-install was one of the reasons to move to gliderlabs/alpine (amongst many others).

[progrium]

Thanks for the feedback. Anybody else?

On Mon, Jun 1, 2015 at 2:31 AM, Jean Mertz [email protected] wrote:

Not sure why we should learn the canonical way to install packages. If
that's the reason, we could also remove the package manager and learn how
to compile from source (exaggerating here).

I'm a big fan of apk-install, instead of apk add --update &&
rm -rf /var/cache/apk/*, and was looking forward to more snippets in this
repo to simplify package management and/or other routinely used tasks.

In the same vein, we created blendle/docker-base
https://github.com/blendle/docker-base to help us extract common tasks
to a higher level.

Obviously, we can simply move this to our own repo, but just voicing my
opinion here that apk-install was one of the reasons to move to
gliderlabs/alpine (amongst many others).

—
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#18 (comment)
.

Jeff Lindsay
http://progrium.com

[jumanjiman]

i like apk-install myself and would prefer to keep it if it's not too much trouble.
i can also see the appeal of an option, such as apk add --update --clean-cache <foo>, in upstream.

[andyshinn]

❤️ apk-install. I'll leave this open for a bit longer. But I would prefer to go along with the community. So far, it sounds like a helper people do like and use.

[frol]

I don't use apk-install, but it would be nice if --clean-cache option will go to Alpine upstream.

[envygeeks]

I'm chiming in to say that even though we've only been using this Alpine image for a month because previously we were Ubuntu users, I think the script serves no purpose that most don't already do manually themselves, we never even noticed this existed in the first place and we only need to clean the cache once so it really adds no benefit.

[ncopa]

How about adding a --no-cache option in upstream apk to make it not save any file on disk in the first place?

[frol]

@ncopa --no-cache would work fine for packages, but from this name I don't expect APKINDEX.tar.gz would be cleaned as well. I do understand that this behaviour is not usual for standalone Alpine installation though, but nevertheless.

[ncopa]

@frol better suggestions for a flag that disables all caching, including APKINDEX.tar.gz?

[ncopa]

added request upstream: http://bugs.alpinelinux.org/issues/4905

[frol]

@ncopa How about using two flags? --no-cache + --no-local-index?

[frol]

@ncopa Another option might be --no-footprint.

[ncopa]

We ended up with --no-cache for this feature. It got accepted upstream: http://git.alpinelinux.org/cgit/apk-tools/commit/?id=c43bfed8deaa0dab47c54db9b8f374853d345a6b

This will be available from v3.3.0_rc2.

[frol]

@ncopa Will this still cache .apk files? Reading the help text "Read uncached index from network" I assume it won't. If so, it is not a replacement for apk-install yet.

[ncopa]

apk will not cache .apk files by default. To enable .apk file caching you need create /etc/apk/cache symlink pointing to cache directory. So nothing will get written in any cache dir.

This should be slightly faster too as it reduces disk IO.

[frol]

@ncopa This sounds great! Thank you!

[andyshinn]

Rebase and push if we still want to add this warning.