You might want to look at packer as well, which can build virtual machines from an ISO, without any user intaraction. I successfully used it to build VMs with Linux, OSX and Windows. It can also create vagrant boxes. You can specify provisioners, e.g. to install R, or a set of R packages, etc. It is under heavy development, by the same team as vagrant.
Gabor On Fri, Mar 21, 2014 at 9:03 AM, Philippe GROSJEAN < philippe.grosj...@umons.ac.be> wrote: > > ..............................................<°}))><........ > ) ) ) ) ) > ( ( ( ( ( Prof. Philippe Grosjean > ) ) ) ) ) > ( ( ( ( ( Numerical Ecology of Aquatic Systems > ) ) ) ) ) Mons University, Belgium > ( ( ( ( ( > .............................................................. > > On 21 Mar 2014, at 10:59, Rainer M Krug <rai...@krugs.de> wrote: > > > Dirk Eddelbuettel <e...@debian.org> writes: > > > >> o Roger correctly notes that R scripts and packages are just one issue. > >> Compilers, libraries and the OS matter. To me, the natural approach > these > >> days would be to think of something based on Docker or Vagrant or (if > you > >> must, VirtualBox). The newer alternatives make snapshotting very > cheap > >> (eg by using Linux LXC). That approach reproduces a full environemnt > as > >> best as we can while still ignoring the hardware layer (and some > readers > >> may recall the infamous Pentium bug of two decades ago). > > > > These two tools look very interesting - but I have, even after reading a > > few discussions of their differences, no idea which one is better suited > > to be used for what has been discussed here: Making it possible to run > > the analysis later to reproduce results using the same versions used in > > the initial analysis. > > > > Am I right in saying: > > > > - Vagrant uses VMs to emulate the hardware > > - Docker does not > > > Yes. > > > > wherefore > > - Vagrant is slower and requires more space > > - Docker is faster and requires less space > > > It depends. For instance, if you run R in VirtualBox under Windows, it may > run faster depending on the code you run and, say, the Lapack library used. > On Linux, you typically got R code run in the VM 2-3% slower than natively, > but In a Windows host, most of my R code runs faster in the VM... But yes, > you need more RAM. > > With Vagrant, you do not need to keep you VM once you don't use it any > more. Then, disk space is shrunk down to a few kB, corresponding to the > Vagrant configuration file. I guess the same is true for Docker? > > A big advantage of Vagrant + VirtualBox is that you got a very similar > virtual hardware, no matter if your host system is Linux, Windows or Mac OS > X. I see this as a good point for better reproducibility. > > > > Therefore, could one say that Vagrant is more "robust" in the long run? > > > May be,... but it depends almost entirely how VirtualBox will support old > VMs in the future! > > PhG > > > How do they compare in relation to different platforms? Vagrant seems to > > be platform agnostic, I can develop and run on Linux, Mac and Windows - > > how does it work with Docker? > > > > I just followed [1] and setup Docker on OSX - loos promising - it also > > uses an underlying VM. SO both should be equal in regards to > > reproducability in the long run? > > > > Please note: I see these questions in the light of this discussion of > > reproducability and not in regards to deployment of applications what > > the discussions on the web are. > > > > Any comments, thoughts, remarks? > > > > Rainer > > > > > > Footnotes: > > [1] http://docs.docker.io/en/latest/installation/mac/ > > > > -- > > Rainer M. Krug > > email: Rainer<at>krugs<dot>de > > PGP: 0x0F52F982 > > ______________________________________________ > > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > > ______________________________________________ > R-devel@r-project.org mailing list > https://stat.ethz.ch/mailman/listinfo/r-devel > [[alternative HTML version deleted]]
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