Comment by dguest
6 years ago
I couldn't agree more. The defense of images over instructions to build them has often been "scientists don't work this way", but to me that's either overly cynical or an indication that something is rotting in academic incentive structures.
You could say the same about distributing docker images for deploying code for non-scientific software as well (and honestly, it may very well be true).
But that doesn't change the fact that it's just way easier to skim a paper and pull a docker image than follow every paper's custom build instructions and software stack.
Why would build instructions have to be custom? Making a reproducible image should be as easy as getting a docker image
> rotting
I would not say rotting. From my perspective, the academic community has always lagged behind engineering best practices (except in their specific fields).