Hi! Discovered resin.io already some time ago and think Docker containers on embedded devices is a very interesting approach.
Just skimmed a little bit through the resin-os docs and was left with the following questions:
- What's your plans for audio and video? The base system doesn't seem to provide any audio or video manager. Should those (e.g. wayland) also be ran inside a container, which could make access from other containers difficult? Or should they if required be included through the Yocto image build process? Or is A/V currently out of scope for you and you focus on pure networked devices?
- Haven't found any description on how prebuilt docker images can be packaged and flashed during the installation process or later on? I only found the rdt push description which seems to push the application sources to the device and builds the image there. This might be interesting for development but would not be anything that I want at all for production. E.g. I don't want to give customers my app sources, I need company git repository access (credentials) during image building, etc.
- What's your reasoning about building all those build and development tools in coffeescript for node? From a pure tool user perspective I know that it's a turn-off for lots of users that it requires node6 on the PC (it's not LTS, other stuff might require other versions, what is that node-thing anyway, ...). And from a developer perspective I would rather not prefer an exotic programming without static typing and a rather volatile ecosystem for a reliable long-term system. I don't want to say here that it isn't possible to create solid project with it and yours might work great - it's just not the first option that comes to my mind.
If you run a privileged container, you can add any sort of audio and video manager in the container. We have users running X11 and Electron inside their containers, for instance.
Preloaded containers is something we have built out for resin.io, and will be extending to resinOS standalone as well. The current release is just the development version. Production version with preloading should follow.
We use node.js for the development toolkit, not for the OS components. There will always be programming language disagreements, but we find we are productive in node.js and it works for us. Coffeescript is admittedly getting a bit long in the tooth and we should switch to ES6 or TypeScript, but I personaly see that as a minor change, though a good one.
Just skimmed a little bit through the resin-os docs and was left with the following questions:
- What's your plans for audio and video? The base system doesn't seem to provide any audio or video manager. Should those (e.g. wayland) also be ran inside a container, which could make access from other containers difficult? Or should they if required be included through the Yocto image build process? Or is A/V currently out of scope for you and you focus on pure networked devices?
- Haven't found any description on how prebuilt docker images can be packaged and flashed during the installation process or later on? I only found the rdt push description which seems to push the application sources to the device and builds the image there. This might be interesting for development but would not be anything that I want at all for production. E.g. I don't want to give customers my app sources, I need company git repository access (credentials) during image building, etc.
- What's your reasoning about building all those build and development tools in coffeescript for node? From a pure tool user perspective I know that it's a turn-off for lots of users that it requires node6 on the PC (it's not LTS, other stuff might require other versions, what is that node-thing anyway, ...). And from a developer perspective I would rather not prefer an exotic programming without static typing and a rather volatile ecosystem for a reliable long-term system. I don't want to say here that it isn't possible to create solid project with it and yours might work great - it's just not the first option that comes to my mind.