Maybe a link to a reference where the better alternatives exist, or update the ones in contrib to match the better ones?

I never used these myself; not sure how popular they are (if they're broken, probably not too popular ☺️)

a readme/link to alternatives would perhaps be nice yes (if we have some place to put it)

Sorry, yes, that's what I've been struggling with -- I don't think these are good examples anymore, or even great for folks to use. They don't have exact replacements, but functionally the idea is simply "generate some content and package it into an image via ADD tarball /. For things like Fedora, CentOS, etc. the relevant release teams publish official tarballs for use in Docker / chroots. For BusyBox, this wasn't a great way to create a BusyBox image to begin with (the result isn't exactly super useful). For Debian, you can get away with something as simple as debootstrap ... && tar -cC ... . | docker import.

If we remove this completely, I'm not sure where we'd put a note about alternatives, but also I'm not sure we really should -- either our documentation or better yet each project's documentation is a better place IMO.

We do have the following note on the whole contrib/ directory:

The contrib directory contains scripts, images, and other helpful things which are not part of the core docker distribution. Please note that they could be out of date, since they do not receive the same attention as the rest of the repository.

Coming back to this from a fresh thought process, another way to put my sentiment is that these scripts are unmaintained, and the ecosystem at large is mature enough now that I don't think it's necessarily our responsibility to help users find alternatives -- these were really helpful when there weren't a lot of base images available, and now we're to the point where that's not remotely accurate (lots of folks have their own special base images these days). 😅

Agreed; makes sense

Looking at this now years later, I'm even more firmly of the opinion that we should remove all the contrib/mkimage-* scripts, if someone wanted to open a PR. 👀 ❤️

(They're all very outdated/unmaintained now.)

I'd even go slightly further and suggest we should consider including contrib/dockerize-disk.sh in the culling, but I feel less strongly about that one.

Yeah, I agree; at least, they haven't been maintained in Years; which may mean they still work, but could just as well be completely broken.

A quick look to see if I can find references to anyone using contrib/mkimage-XXX gives me 20 hits; https://grep.app/search?q=contrib%2Fmkimage-

The only potentially active reference I could find was this one;

• https://github.com/vimagick/dockerfiles/blob/5675c4c1e5dc5c7cffc554e87a44451f13f471fb/alpine-arm/Makefile

All the other ones were either forked / inspired by, archived, or some docs linking;

• archived; https://github.com/conda-archive/conda-docker/blob/375429c4d20f8971dc66fd2b779f52abfc9d12b9/centos6-32-minimal-base/create_docker_image.sh
• fork based on; https://github.com/gliderlabs/docker-alpine/blob/25d285ff5901c40b3e655995a17ee9c4e1590af6/builder/scripts/mkimage-alpine.bash
• fork based on; https://github.com/wazuh/wazuh-packages/blob/5f5d9f521078f6fa68bcf24fba4f9831c6aa33d2/rpms/CentOS/5/i386/docker_builder.sh
• fork based on; https://github.com/rhoit/my-config/blob/5700d347cb4ea467beecda0a7b28da7ab2b0eb77/docker/mkimage-arch.sh
• docs linking to the script; https://github.com/zembutsu/docs.docker.jp/blob/b99dd15defc2e56a82018002aba50386b286a6d1/engine/userguide/eng-image/baseimages.rst
• fork based on; https://github.com/sapk/dockerfiles/blob/86dd180e9fa5e98ee2110a55b407ba8896099240/archlinux/Dockerfile
• changelog; https://github.com/docker/docs/blob/a1774fe925fa8ea1065cceb3877e67fc57967c9f/content/manuals/engine/release-notes/prior-releases.md
• archived; https://github.com/conda-archive/conda-docker/blob/375429c4d20f8971dc66fd2b779f52abfc9d12b9/centos6-32-minimal-base/create_docker_image.sh
• fork based on; https://github.com/epheo/shaddock/blob/2c27eba0c1df5fdb98233a9121cfb0c2c797c421/tests/model/utils/arch_dockerimage_basebuilder.sh
• archived; https://github.com/LCTT/TranslateProject/blob/4948360714403ebcefc3abff80dcc69ad706bf5d/published/201505/20150330%202%20Ways%20to%20Create%20Your%20Own%20Docker%20Base%20Image.md
• archived, changelog; https://github.com/docker-archive/docker-ce/blob/44a430f4c43e61c95d4e9e9fd6a0573fa113a119/components/engine/CHANGELOG.md
• archived; https://github.com/docker-archive/leeroy/blob/e1d2556ecf85d11d5b739b300928fcae641c51aa/github/pull_request_test.go
• fork based on; https://github.com/hepsw/docks/blob/1ef30a922a6df692a193a318b6cf7828c00fe6de/mkimage-slc5.sh
• fork based on; https://github.com/hepsw/docks/blob/1ef30a922a6df692a193a318b6cf7828c00fe6de/mkimage-slc.sh
• docs linking to the script; https://github.com/CoinXu/blog/blob/952b87bbf07fda877de8c8d68cb32a88908a26b4/tools/docker/4-2-create-a-base-image.md
• archived; https://github.com/hypriot/rpi-alpine-scratch/blob/adbd320c195ffe368cc00c8496ca4da7b31f703c/.drone.yml
• docs refering (in comment); https://github.com/YahuiWong/docker-ss-tproxy/blob/bab18708cbf522aa1d43f4a47f63c7c2b6b9e639/README.md
• archived, changelog; https://github.com/rancher/docker-from-scratch/blob/084910d99b12408467a559f338e5a27bf4a1aed3/vendor/github.com/docker/docker/CHANGELOG.md

So, yeah, I think it should be safe to just ditch those scripts.

• opened a PR to remove them; contrib: remove mkimage-xxx scripts #50297