Create a sort of mission document

[jcbhmr]

@eitsupi does this seem like a good limited scope? Looking for a second opinion since you mentioned concerns about scope and what this @devcontainers-community thing should be

loosely based on ideas from #1

[eitsupi]

This is fantastic! I wrote some of my opinions.

In particular, I think that Docker image distribution should not be considered first.
Some reasons below

1. It is less flexible than installation by Feature, which allows any version to be installed on any image. For example, check the images for Julia repository¹ and the discussion².
2. Unlike Features and Templates, which have an established distribution method, it must be built from a build system. It also requires a significant amount of effort to maintain, as regular builds are needed to keep up with upstream updates.

Footnotes

1. https://github.com/julia-vscode/julia-devcontainer ↩

2. https://github.com/microsoft/vscode-dev-containers/issues/1114 ↩

[jcbhmr]

I think that Docker image distribution should not be considered first. Unlike Features and Templates, which have an established distribution method, it must be built from a build system. It also requires a significant amount of effort to maintain, as regular builds are needed to keep up with upstream updates.

You're absolutely right. Thanks! ❤️

I do think that images are a sort of de-facto "preset" like you just punch in:

{ "image": "ghcr.io/octocat/images/my-awesome-env" }

and you're done! It also is really fast in comparison to literally rebuilding Python from source or whatever; point is I think this is a valuable future idea

But yeah you're 100% correct that it's difficult! The size of the devcontainers/images repo vs the devcontainers/features repo makes that really apparent! Definitely not the first thing to tackle.

Thanks for being a moderating voice of reason 🙏 i really appreciate your involvement