[GRASS-user] Open Peer-Review Reproducible Publication with Org and GRASS

[Ken Mankoff]

> On Fri, Jun 3, 2016 at 4:19 PM, Ken Mankoff <mankoff at gmail.com> wrote:
> How about distributing it as a docker image?

A lot of people have suggested Docker. I'm thinking about reproducibility on the decadal timeframe more than next month or next year. Perhaps that is the wrong focus? Anyway, I don't trust Docker on these timescales.

I have a Windows 98 Virtual Machine that is ~10 years old that I've carried from computer to computer many times. Now that VirtualBox, VMWare, and others can share VMs, and have done so for a long time, that seems like a long-term approach.

I doubt the docker commands on OS X (which seems only partially supported) that I need to run today will work in 1-10 years.

I've also realized the Org part of the document is irrelevant. You don't need to use Emacs, Org, and Babel to reproduce it. You can cut-and-paste the grass code sections into a terminal. Emacs + Org is a much higher barrier to reproduction that "install bash and grass 7.0.3". I'll point this out in the revisions. Cut-and-paste is good enough for now, although a single "make" command is still the goal. Perhaps for the next paper...

  -k.