Establish test images

[msarahan]

It would be good to have test images that represent user systems. Ideally, more than one platform could be tested. This is all subject to time constraints on how much time tests can take.

Proposed platforms:

• CentOS 5
• Some current RHEL-based release
• Some old Debian
• Some current Ubuntu release (especially with the new GCC 5, to test how packages are affected by that)

[pelson]

Maybe we can do this as a separate process which reports on the status of the tests. Sure, the horse has already bolted at that point, but at least as maintainers, we know whether it got away cleanly or not...

[jjhelmus]

This sounds like a great idea. I might suggest some subset of the following images.

• Ubuntu 12.04 LTS
• Ubuntu 14.04 LTS
• Ubuntu 15.10
• Ubuntu 16.04 LTS when release
• CentOS 5
• CentOS 6
• CentOS 7
• Debian 8 (jessie)
• Debian 7 (wheezy)

Adding some recent Fedora released may be good, but I am not aware of what the most relevant versions would be.

In terms of what should be installed in these test images I would suggest starting with the manylinux shared libraries installed to represent a "base" system. Quoting from PEP513

On Debian-based systems, these libraries are provided by the packages

libncurses5 libgcc1 libstdc++6 libc6 libx11-6 libxext6
libxrender1 libice6 libsm6 libgl1-mesa-glx libglib2.0-0

On RPM-based systems, these libraries are provided by the packages

ncurses libgcc libstdc++ glibc libXext libXrender
libICE libSM mesa-libGL glib2

To this add miniconda, a few essential tools (wget, curl, ssl) and a perhaps some debugging and auditing tools (gdb, auditwheel).