Hi guys!
Lately I have been working on improving docker support in bootstrap-vz.
The culmination of my efforts is a publicly available Debian jessie image, built from scratch, that clocks in at 83.08 MB (or 32 MB when gzipped).
I don't intend to maintain this image, instead I made it available so anybody that is interested could check it out and see if it holds up under scrutiny.
For comparison, the official Debian jessie image is 125.1 MB, so 42.02 MB bigger than mine.
I have achieved this rather large difference by making use of the bootstrap-vz minimize size plugin, which can exclude things like manpages and additional documentation not only when installing packages but also when running the initial `debootstrap` command (here's how). I tried to get the image as close to the official one as possible: SHA-summing all files in both containers confirms that equality.
The only difference are
* (obviously) the missing files in /usr/share/{doc,locale,man}
* some conf.d files that I've split up into smaller files
* log & machine-id files that would be expected to differ
Do any of you think
tianon would be interested in switching to bootstrap-vz? Alternatively, the method used to minimize the image size could be ported to mkimage.
Oh, and by the way: The minimize size plugin of course works for all the providers in bootstrap-vz :-)