jcohen02
commented
1 year ago Hi @aflaxman, thanks for the contribution and positive feedback on the project 🙂.
We're very happy to receive further edits. If you are planning to make small updates such as fixing typos or making minor enhancements/corrections to the descriptions to improve readability/understandability of the material, that's great.
If you'd like to make more substantial contributions in terms of changing the structure, adding new material or revising the descriptions, I'd strongly advise opening an issue first, explaining what you plan to do. We can then discuss between the maintainers of the content and offer any feedback or suggestions before you put the time in to make changes.
In terms of your point about people not being familiar with Docker, this is an important point and one that's currently a bit of a challenge with this material. The maintainers of this lesson have generally been teaching the material as part of a 2-day course covering both Docker and Singularity (e.g. https://www.archer2.ac.uk/training/courses/220119-containers/), this ensures that learners have some familiarity with Docker prior to starting this module. Although we are, of course, are very keen for others to make use of the material in whatever way works best for them.
A more fundamental issue is that we find that the vast majority of attendees at our courses are Windows and Mac users. To provide an environment where they can build Singularity images from scratch in an environment where they have root privileges, we opted to use the Docker Singularity images hosted on quay.io. The later stages of the lesson are, therefore, based on this approach. We then end up requiring Docker knowledge to be able to cover this material. I see a few options here but I guess I should write this up in a general issue so that others can more easily discover it and add thoughts and comments rather than leaving the discussion as part of this PR.
With reference to your revised text, I'll add a review with suggestions but just a couple of points to highlight - we've worked hard with the companion docker lesson to try and ensure complete consistency in the terminology we use around containers and images. As regular users of these tools we found that we sometimes use these terms interchangably and while we know what we mean, we found that this can cause confusion for learners who are completely new to the concepts. In this regard, I'd suggest a couple of minor updates to your text. Also, I wonder if we can make the text a little more general so that it's not focused specifically on research projects (although these can be used as examples).
Anyway, thanks again for the contribution, I appreciate your interest in the project and do feel free to suggest further updates.
aflaxman
I love this project you have here, and I wonder if you would be open to edits as I read through it. For my audience, Docker will perhaps not be such a familiar technology, so I've tried to introduce Singularity without comparing it to Docker first.
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