Container images are published immediately when creating a new repo from this template repo

[Scotchester]

GitHub's template repo feature currently has no way to prevent new repos created from the template from including certain files.

As a result, as soon as a new repo is created from this template repo, the Publish devcontainer workflow runs immediately in the new repo, which is useless. See this example from the slackronyms repo I just created.

It's not obvious to me what the ideal solution is. I guess some kind of conditional in the publish-devcontainer.yml file that will only run it if the repo in question is compilerla/template-devcontainer? Or another option would be to make it only run when manually triggered, not on any push to main, if we don't mind having to remember that each time we merge a PR.

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Not directly related, but I'm curious as to why 12 untagged images also get created in addition to the three that are tagged for the supported Python versions. Screenshotting because I'm about to delete all of these:

It looks like this is also happens here in this repo, though.

Maybe warrants a separate issue if this isn't expected behavior.

[thekaveman]

Hmm, maybe the bigger question is: why is this repo publishing a Docker image at all?

I think there may have been some use in showing an example of how that could be done in the past. Doesn't feel as relevant now (and that workflow is pretty out of date anyway).

I also haven't found GitHub's template repository features to be all that compelling (esp. in light of the discussion you linked). Another route could be to convert this back to a regular repo and update the instructions for using it (e.g. clone, make changes, push to a new repo).

Screenshotting because I'm about to delete all of these

Yes please!

[Scotchester]

Hmm, maybe the bigger question is: why is this repo publishing a Docker image at all?

I think there may have been some use in showing an example of how that could be done in the past. Doesn't feel as relevant now (and that workflow is pretty out of date anyway).

It looks like the main reason for doing this was in service of offering a pre-built dev container image upon which a new project could build its dev container. See the docs for the pre-built image.

I am skeptical of how useful that would actually be, given the established model of basing the dev container off the app container (when the app is containerized). I suppose it could be useful in the static site scenario where we're not doing that.

I also haven't found GitHub's template repository features to be all that compelling (esp. in light of the discussion you linked). Another route could be to convert this back to a regular repo and update the instructions for using it (e.g. clone, make changes, push to a new repo).

It's hard to disagree with this!