Support request for providing the TeX Live Docker images

[Paulo Roberto Massa Cereda]

Hi list,

For a few years, we have been providing the more or less official TL 
docker images at https://hub.docker.com/r/texlive/texlive (repository at 
https://gitlab.com/islandoftex/images/texlive). This especially includes 
the latest TeX Live from net installer (in four flavors: no src/no doc 
tree, with src/no doc tree, no src/with doc tree, with src/with doc 
tree) and historic images (i.e. from previous years' final ISO images).

Up to now, all these images and flavors have been built using GitLab CI 
which was very easy to set up and use for us. However, as of this year, 
TL has grown to a size where the GitLab provided capacities does not 
allow us to build the latest TL image with src/with doc tree anymore. 
And for historic images it even fails to build the barebones ones even 
for as small ones as TL 2014.

There are two properties of the GitLab runners that fail here:

- The CI runners have a job timeout of 3 hours. Especially with historic 
images where only few mirrors are available we regularly get timeouts.

- The CI runners are limited to approx. 20 GB of space. With all the 
Docker setup this starts to fail when images reach approx. 5 GiB of 
space which the `latest-doc-src` image (and actually the images with 
documentation and sources of previous years) are reaching.

So here we are looking for alternatives to continue providing these 
images. Our Dockerfiles are fully functional, so it is really only a 
matter of build capacity. We are open to all alternatives. The essential 
two alternatives we have thought of:

- setting up an own GitLab CI runner on some hardware (which hardware?)
- build somewhere else (some server or GitHub actions or something that 
copes with the large images).

Essentially, what we need either way is longer job timeouts and more 
available disk space (approx. 30–40 GB of free space for building). RAM 
and network bandwidth are actually not a bottleneck because in this kind 
of setup, we are mostly limited by the mirrors and TL installation is 
primarily disk I/O-heavy.

For both options outlined above we lack capacities. So we are looking 
for help on that or advise on other options.

Just to have it mentioned somewhere: Until we have found some kind of 
replacement, we cannot continue providing all image flavors.

If anyone has ideas how we can continue providing all Docker images or 
would be willing to help us implement a new build infrastructure, we are 
eagerly waiting for ideas.

Greetings from the island!

Cheerio,

Paulo