Separate repositories for images and tracks?

[cloin]

Hello!

I just wanted to kick off a discussion around potentially separating out images and tracks into separate repositories. I think this might be helpful in the long run for testing and keeping everything tidy. Images have not seen many changes and we might benefit from more straightforward linting and automatic image build through github actions if we are able to pull these two apart.

I'd like to propose two repositories named instruqt-tracks and instruqt-images.

Thoughts?

@gundalow @IPvSean @anshulbehl @craig-br

[gundalow]

We can define that certain GitHub Actions tests only run if certain files have been changed. This is a good way to avoid long unseeded CI runs.

If we split testing into two repos, and an update is made to the image repo, how would we know the lab still works, is the proposal

1. PR1 instruqt-images update and tag image
2. Locally update lab to use new version (I assume we've pin image versions)
3. PR2: instruqt-tracks changes from above step. Validated through CI?

If we do this, we MUST rename this repo to instruqt-tracks go GitHub will redirect weblinks.

[cloin]

For the most part, I'd expect images to remain fairly static with builds kicked off weekly to keep them up to date. Otherwise, I see content creators using only existing images and making small modifications (package installs, config changes, etc.) using lifecycle scripts on the individual tracks.

The track testing can be scheduled from github actions using instruqt cli. Alternatively, we have webhooks enabled on the instruqt account so we can receive track failures as they occur.