alt Hacker NewsMy kind of nerd humor but I read the article only to find that the question I had going into it is not answered: How large might those containers (with/without community) get?
Who's taking the nerd-snipe bait? ;)
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diggan • 01/21/2025
> How large might those containers (with/without community) get?
Thrown together awk summing alpine main repository as of v3.21:
awk -F ':' '/^I:/ { sum += $2 } END { print sum }' APKINDEX | numfmt --to=iec --suffix=B
Probably not even the largest image out there, but large enough to be too large :)
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Author here. I did run these numbers, I guess I just didn't think to write them up. I've recomputed them for Alpine 3.21 here.
Maximising the number of packages gives 5492/5536 packages (99.2%) for just main, with a total install size of 17.03GiB. Including community gives 25026/25383 packages (98.6%) with a total install size of 107.85GiB.
If we instead maximise the total installed size directly, we install 5428/5536 (98.0%) packages from main, with a total install size of 17.06GiB. Including community gives 24711/25383 packages (97.4%) with a total install size of 110.36GiB.
Of course, if you're building a container, it would be redundant to install a kernel, so these numbers are somewhat inflated.