Or store the containers in the Internet Archive alongside the paper. They’re just tarballs. Lots of options as long as you're comfortable with object storage.
This still means that tools published in the last few years until now might just be gone soon. The people who uploaded the images might have graduated or moved on and none will be there to save the work.
Yep, just mentioned it to the Archive Team IRC. We're probably going to selectively archive particular Docker images, although that's a lot of manual labor.
If you have any ideas wrt to selecting important images, that'd be great.
Yeah, good idea — I’m not in these fields so it’s difficult for me to judge. Also, it sounds like we should be prioritizing niche images that only a handful of papers use rather than images that people rely upon regularly.
Couldn't you bootstrap a list by searching/parsing the Archive dataset itself? Searching for
A) "docker pull" commands and parsing the text that comes after it based on the command's syntax[1] to extract instructional references to images such as "docker pull ubuntu:latest, and
Since images tend to be based on each other I wonder if someone's analyzed the corresponding dependency graph yet. In theory you should get quite far if you isolate the most commonly used base images.