Another update: the base distributions of the ocaml/opam2 images have also been updated to support Fedora 30, Alpine 3.10, OpenSUSE Leap 42.1 and also the impending Debian 10 (Buster) release. We have also deprecated Fedora 27/28, Ubuntu 14.04 and Alpine 3.8 in favour of the newer releases. The 4.09 switches also reflect the recently released 4.09+beta1 snapshot.
There have been a few requests for ‘slimmer’ images that use up less disk-space. The reason the existing ones are so big is that each container has multiple precompiled compilers (either multiple major releases, or feature variants such as flambda or afl). This is really useful for continuous integration, but is less ideal if you just want a quick OCaml compiler container to build some software on your QubesOS laptop.
In order to accommodate both usecases, I’m going to resurrect the ocaml/opam containers for the “slim” usecase. The containers in ocaml/opam are currently deprecated while we did the opam2 release, but now that is out of the way we can remove the opam1 containers. Over the next few months, we’ll have ocaml/opam containers with minimally sized toolchains for production compilation use, and the ocaml/opam2 containers will continue to be maintained unchanged for CI use.
As always, more feedback or usecases welcome to help guide the evolution of this infrastructure.