Probably it will be a good idea to create installable script for using docker image

[twaik]

I wrote this one

#!/bin/bash
if [ "$#" -eq "0" ]; then
	set -- bash
fi

docker start termux-docker >/dev/null 2>&1 || \
	docker run --detach --init --name termux-docker -it termux/termux-docker:latest
docker exec -itu system termux-docker "$@"

Using this I can invoke termux commands from my regular shell like this.

termux apt-file search xcb-image.pc

Or simply enter termux environment with termux command.

[robertkirkman]

This scenario is very generic, not just to Docker in general, but to containers in general as a whole, one of the most common examples of which is Distrobox, which is a wrapper around Docker and/or Podman that sort of already implements that concept generically in a container-agnostic way.
https://github.com/89luca89/distrobox/blob/main/docs/usage/distrobox-enter.md#examples

distrobox-enter my-container -- echo 'example'

Does that make this a little bit out of scope, since it seems like the "generic solution" would simply be for the user to import the container to a Distrobox configuration and then use the Distrobox wrapper features to do almost exactly the same thing you described?

[robertkirkman]

Some time ago, I used code from your message here in a personal project, and I did not get around to uploading it until now. The code i copied is still visible so it's like a fork or expansion of your version that is intended to make it easier to install termux-docker ARM into an x86 PC without unwanted side effects or manual steps.

https://gist.github.com/robertkirkman/f79441c79811ad263f2f881f7864e793#file-install-termux-docker-inside-qemu-full-system-emulator-sh

irrelevant extra info for context

This is actually basically the thing that I was using here #72 (comment) when I said that I tried to compile something, which was at the time pypy3, in QEMU and it was successful, but it took 16 hours to compile. That was when I decided that this script isn't useful for CI because it can't build large packages within the 6 hour time limit, and that for CI building of ARM packages in termux-docker, termux-docker should eventually be connected to the ARM GitHub Actions runner.

For a while, I didn't really think that anyone else would need this installer I made, because most people seemed to prefer using qemu-user which is more lightweight, so I didn't really upload it.

However, eventually, the topic did start coming up more frequently that some people who mainly use x86 and don't have convenient access to an ARM device might need to use a termux-docker ARM emulator the way I do to debug issues and avoid bugs caused by qemu-user that qemu-system is not affected by, so now I have posted my script for easily installing a qemu-system-based termux-docker emulator from 1 command. That particular issue did turn out to be reproducible on both ARM and x86, but at first I couldn't reproduce it on x86 for some reason, so that is why I was talking about this in that issue at that time.