There is a proliferation of ocaml images and alternate docker repositories across the Internet. docker pull / podman pull makes it trivial to download hundreds of MB of images on your machine in a matter of seconds.
So its important to understand who controls and updates the OCaml docker hub images
Can anybody tell me that? I would feel much more comfortable using these images if I knew this for sure.
Also can there be some resource on ocaml.org / ocaml github repo / anywhere else that OCaml-ers lurk that links to “official” or “approved” ocaml docker images so people can be more confident in using them on their local machines?
This is indeed a very important concern! There is supposed to be some documentation appearing on https://hub.docker.com/r/ocaml/opam explaining what the images are, but in the meantime allow me to answer it here.
u/ocaml on the Hub is under the same administrative control as the ocaml.org domain (@avsm can give the precise list people with admin access, but it’s a small list).
Note that this Hub account exists for the purposes of driving the core OCaml and opam repository CI and infrastructure, and is carefully maintained with that in mind. Any other uses of it (e.g. for end users) can be built on top of it, but we lack the resources to make any long term guarantees for non-CI use cases.
PRs and initiatives are welcome to improve the documentation for such non-CI usecases. However, you should think carefully if you want to depend on someone else’s base images at all for your application.