Discuss `binder.yaml` files and what to support

In the Binder repo we discussed a way to let users specify their distribution (e.g. artful vs. zesty). It was decided that a binder.yaml file would be a good way to do this. Let’s use this issue to see what kind of functionality we want to support in this file.

[choldgraf]

I think those are all good questions, IMO users should be responsible for making sure their code etc runs the way they want on those base distributions…we should only make it possible to select them.

The more I think about it, the more I like the idea of having a strict “everything in binder.yaml must also be possible to specify in its own standalone file”. That way as @yuvipanda describes we could just parse binder.yaml, create a file for each entry, then run r2d on the generated files.

[consideRatio]

Since this issue is stale and I couldn’t conclude a clear action point, I’ll go for a close at this point.