MegaLinter Flavor Generator

This script injects a new bioinformatics flavor into the MegaLinter code base, then builds and pushes that flavor as an image named bl-megalinter.

Rationale

Q: Why do any of this?

MegaLinter is great and super useful. Maintaining an equivalent tool takes a lot of effort and is brittle.

Problem: The full flavor of MegaLinter is 9+ GB and takes 3+ minutes to download during a GitHub workflow.

Solution: Use a flavor to reduce the image size.

Problem: There are no flavors that contain lintr or perlcritic.

Solution: Request a new flavor that contains the linters we need.

Problem: The MegaLinter devs have no obligation to accept our flavor or to make any updates we request in the future.

Solution: Fork MegaLinter or include it as a submodule.

Q: Why not fork MegaLinter?

I tried that and ran into problems:

• Adding a new flavor requires touching numerous files
• MegaLinter has a ton of specialized GitHub workflows, some of which are re-generated during the build
• Maintaining local changes and attempting to sync with upstream changes is a gigantic pain
• Not syncing with upstream (i.e. treating this as a one-off) will require us to start over if we want any changes