Docker: Investigate R package mamba install failing

[Souheil-Yazji]

The following mamba install command fails to resolve https://github.com/StatCan/aaw-kubeflow-containers/blob/master/docker-bits/6_rstudio.Dockerfile#L13-L27

Possible approaches to debug

• Execute the mamba install command on a local image (will need to point to an upstream channel)
• Execute the mamba install command on an LVM
• Remove the quiet flag and build the image (less efficient)
• dissolve the command into isolated mamba install calls

[AbdallaAbdelhadi]

@Souheil-Yazji Here is what I found out:

• First I tried installing all the packages independently to check weather maybe one package takes longer than the others but all them seemed to download around the same time
• Then I started to increase the amount of packages installed in a single command. I noticed that as you increase the packages mamba takes longer to download. And at round like 6-7 packages it just gets stuck searching for the packages and never downloads. Seems like mamba has a problem of resolving lots of packages together in one command.

Possible solutions:

• First solution I tried is breaking down the download command. As I mentioned the more packages we install in one command the longer it takes, so the more we break it down the better the execution.
• Second solution I tried is using conda instead of mamba. This took <5min to download all the packages.
• Third solution I tried is upgrading mamba to version 2.0.0 (the version being ran in the image is 1.5.8). This solution executed a little better than using conda.