Container Playground Guide

The repository bundles a handful of experimental Docker configurations that try to exercise pytest's dependency graph under intentionally awkward conditions.

Prerequisites

• A working Docker Engine installation (the standard docker CLI must be available in your shell).
• Enough disk space to build multiple images – several of the variants deliberately install heavy dependency sets.

Running tests for a specific variant

To build a particular Dockerfile variant and run the repository test suites inside the resulting container, execute the helper script and point it at the Dockerfile you want to exercise:

./build_and_test.sh docker/variants/Dockerfile.cyclic-1

The script builds the chosen image, runs the main testing/ suite, and then executes any workflow harness tests bundled under .github/workflows/tests if that directory exists.

Variant catalog

The docker/variants directory contains intentionally broken configurations. The minimal-* files omit dependencies entirely, the missing-deps-* files install conflicting toolchains, and the cyclic-* files ship toy libraries whose imports deadlock at runtime. None of them should be treated as production ready.