[Bioc-devel] Deprecation of bioc_docker and bioconductor_full containers

[Turaga, Nitesh]

Dear Bioconductor developers,

There are new set of Bioconductor docker images under the name bioconductor/bioconductor_docker. These are located at https://github.com/Bioconductor/bioconductor_docker. The new set of images will have a `devel` image and a `RELEASE_3_10` / `latest` image.

With these new set of images due to be released in the coming days, we will be deprecating the previous Bioconductor images and they will not be supported beyond this release cycle. Please check the list of images which will be deprecated here, https://hub.docker.com/repository/docker/bioconductor/bioconductor_docker#legacy. We will send another email 2 days before the deprecation process as another notice for anyone still using them and might still be on holiday. The legacy containers will still be available but not supported anymore both on Dockerhub and Github (issues will not be answered). 

These images are a major improvement over our previous set of images, they significantly streamline image inheritance and reduce the burden of maintaining these images. The new set of images will have a complete set of system dependencies for almost all Bioconductor packages (expect for 23 in devel and 10 in RELEASE_3_10). These containers will still have RStudio as their front end, and inherit from the rocker project's "rocker/rstudio" images.

We have also adopted a more formal release cycle, contributions policy, and software end of life (deprecation) policy similar to the Bioconductor packages. 

Please let me know if you have any questions or concerns. We will try to address them the best we can on this thread. There is also a slack channel #containers on the "community-bioc.slack.com".

Best regards,

Nitesh Turaga

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