check if Alpine can be used to make images smaller in size

[hewag1975]

No description provided.

[hewag1975]

Here is a short summary of my trial:

Ressources:

• Official Alpine docker image
• Minimal docker images for R project.
• System package overview for Alpine Linux

Findings:

1. difficult to install packages with system dependencies. While this worked e.g. for data.table I was not able to install sf.

FROM rhub/r-minimal:4.2.1
RUN installr -d data.table # succeeds
RUN installr -d sf # fails

Main issues are missing libraries and/or dependencies. Also there is no mapping between Ubuntu libraries and Alpine libraries, so we would have to make our way through this ourselves.... (without knowing of all required functionalities are available at all).

2. There doesn't seem to be AWS CLI support for Alpine, see this issue. Trying to add download and install it manually made me end up in Python hell. So, even though there might be hacks to get around this, I doubt that it's worth the effort.

3. I did not even try to install packages from our DRAT repo, but this might end up becoming another issue....

@cstepper, maybe you want to add your thoughts here...