Baking the model in was the wrong call: it is the part that weighs gigabytes,
everyone keeps a different one, and it has no business inside an image. The
binary is the opposite — whisper.cpp plus its libraries come to 2 MB. So the
tools go in and the model is mounted under /models, pointed at by WHISPER_MODEL.
Two things had to be worked out to build it. ggml tunes for the building
machine's CPU by default, which on arm64 emits -mcpu=native+nodotprod+noi8mm+nosve
and GCC 12 rejects outright; GGML_NATIVE=OFF fixes that and is what a portable
image wants anyway. And `cmake --install` insists on installing every example,
including binaries we deliberately did not build, so the artefacts are copied
straight out of the build tree.
A missing model is now reported before any work starts, not hit halfway through:
in a container the path is supplied from outside and the file behind it may
simply not be there.
Verified on the running daemon: image builds, and inside the container the full
pipeline reproduces the host run exactly — 13 copies, 880 scripts, 13 884
recordings, 3531 images and 6928 animations (81 515 frames). Graphics decode in
the container too, since the JRE image carries java.desktop. Thumbnails and
on-demand frame rendering answer over the published port, MCP lists 9 tools, the
collection mount rejects writes, the process runs as uid 10001, and data survives
a restart. The transcription chain was exercised with a stub binary in place of
whisper-cli: ffmpeg hands it exactly 16 kHz mono and results reach the database.
Only a real model run remains untried, since no model was downloaded.
Note on size: the image goes from 516 MB to 1.09 GB, and ffmpeg alone accounts
for 410 MB of that.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
