Re: VM for org-based reproducible environment?

[Rasmus <rasmus@gmx.us>]

Matt Price <moptop99@gmail.com> writes:

> I'd like to provide a way for people to copy my course materials in the
> easiest possible way. At present my export & grading processes rely on some
> customization of various tools, mostly emacs-based. So I'm thinking the
> easiest thing might be fore me to define a virtual machine, maybe
> docker-based, and distribute that.

Docker might be handy if you need a whole array of tools, say R, Org, a
number of libraries etc etc.  It's not too complicated to created new
docker images and you can host/compile them on "dockerhub".  You can find
the files that create docker images on e.g. github.

Personally, I use an external config.el file to publish files against the
ELPA version of Org.

Something like,

    emacs --batch --no-init-file --load paper-config/org-conf.el --find-file $1 --funcall $2

In addition, I compile the papers with gitlab-ci.  You can include
instructions of what software is needed in the .gitlab-ci.yml.

You might also be able to use something like Guix.  I think it can even be
used to create docker images these days.

Hope it helps,
Rasmus

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