Hello everyone,

I wanted to ask the community and the admins if there would be any interest
in making an official ROS repo for the Docker Hub Registry
<https://registry.hub.docker.com/>?

I've been using ROS with Docker <https://www.docker.com/> for a while now,
and I've found it really helpful for my ROS projects. Learning how to use
Linux containers takes a bit of a learning curve but once you get a hang of
it, its like you can't stop thinking inside the container
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thinking_outside_the_box>.

So I've been using it as development environment tool as well as a platform
for sharing working demos, as well as the a perfect tool for deploying apps
to robots. For one of my research lab's projects, OmniMapper
<http://www.cogrob.org/2014/05/omnimapper-modular-multimodal-mapping-framework/>,
I've
been documenting my progress in our github wiki pages. I made a docker
image for the demo, allowing novices users to skip much of the tedious
build and dependency processes, and get straight to running and playing
with the project, as I explain in this tutorial
<https://github.com/CognitiveRobotics/omnimapper/wiki/Tutorial-%7C-OmniMapper-&-Docker>
.

I have to say, I'm not the first to do this, it seem to be trending here
and there, so just to cite a few:

   - Gernot Klingler <http://gernotklingler.com/blog/> and his a detailed
   post: How docker replaced my virtual machines and chroots
   <http://gernotklingler.com/blog/docker-replaced-virtual-machines-chroots/>,
   a guide in how to enable a container to connect to an x-server and
   graphical hardware acceleration.
   - opencog <https://github.com/opencog> with examples
   <https://github.com/opencog/ros> in the use of Docker for research and
   collaboration within the robotics community.
   - quantumobject / docker-ros-base
   <https://registry.hub.docker.com/u/quantumobject/docker-ros-base/>

This sort of reminds me how I got into using ROS when first playing with it
in virtual machines, like these ones
<http://nootrix.com/2014/09/ros-indigo-virtual-machine/>, way back when.
But know I can get bare metal performance, mount any arbitrary directories
or hardware from my host, and keep my images tiny on disk. Plus, I get to
pick any modern Linux distro to use as a host, not just Ubuntu.

So I've followed the Guidelines for Creating and Documenting Official
Repositories <https://docs.docker.com/docker-hub/official_repos/>, and have
a few proposed images for both Indigo and Hydro. I have a fork of rosdistro
<https://github.com/ruffsl/rosdistro> with the necessary Dockerfiles (just
my first though on where to pull request them into), and a fork of
docker-library/docs <https://github.com/ruffsl/docs> with the appropriate
entry for ROS image conforming to the registry's standards.

I can contact the Docker Hub admins to get the project added, I just wanted
to get in touch with the admins first and get the community's blessing.

Feedback welcome!

Ruffin