Silex
commented
4 years ago Well, "it depends".
Emacs is a software that always built against what was the current version of libraries at the time. So if you want to build say Emacs 25.2 on Ubuntu 20.04, you have to downgrade a lot of libraries for it to actually build.
At the moment, everything < 24.5 is built with 14.04, and everything >= 24.5 is built with 18.04.
I expect that everything > 26.1 would build with 20.04, but I'm not sure.
Also, latest alpine has very few packages compared to previous versions. For example I simply bumped to alpine 3.10 to test and a lot of images didn't build, even tho these alpine are very similar.
So, in theory yes there is interest to always build on the latest image possible, in practice it's a lot of try & err in figuring out which lib version is required etc. But that'd require quite some refactoring to move from apt get install foo into wget foo && tar -x && make install.
Would there be any advantage in basing the docker-emacs images on the latest ubuntu/alpine versions? Just wondering if it is worthy to invest some time on that.