Greetings! With all the updates that have happened with Ostree Native Containers and Atomic desktops, we wanted to share some initial thoughts on the direction for evolving the user experience of image-based systems and what that means for the packages and projects that provide the foundation for this technology.
The main tool to manage packages and upgrades on ostree systems has been rpm-ostree. With the introduction of OSTree Native Containers and CoreOS layering (https://github.com/coreos/layering-examples), rpm-ostree turned into a system that also managed container-native image upgrades and deployments. This gave us an opportunity to reconsider `dnf` for image-based systems, a tool that Fedora system administrators are accustomed to manage the RPM packages and introduce `bootc`, a new tool to boot containers and manage image-based Fedora deployments. Rough consensus was forming around these points: On the short-term: * dnf4 & dnf5 should provide a more helpful error when a user types `dnf install` on a booted image-based system (pointing them to unlock the system or use rpm-ostree). * `bootc` (https://github.com/containers/bootc) is now available to manage the container/image-based lifecyle on Fedora 39 and up hosts. * No new major development should be done on rpm-ostree; we will provide fixes and security updates but major development for client-side features should be directed to `bootc` for container/image lifecycle management and `dnf` for package management. * dnf should be used during container builds of image-based Fedora for most applications and examples. Long term (Maybe Fedora 43/45 timeframe...): * rpm-ostree client-side functionality handling package layering/install/overrides should be folded into dnf. (A *lot* of details here) * rpm-ostree will continue to be part of the ostree/ostree-container base image composes. However this will be re-assessed after dnf has become the default client-side tool for image-based Fedora systems. As part of the UX we want dnf to continue to be the tool that sysadmins see as the way to manage their RPM packages, even on image-based systems. Some specific features of bootc to manage the image lifecycle like `bootc upgrade` might be wrapped by `dnf upgrade` on image mode systems, however we see bootc as the main tool to manage the image-based hosts' deployments and we don't plan to hide this from the customers behind dnf. Our intent with the Fedora Change proposal is to cover the initial UX changes, add bootc and and re-introduce dnf on image-mode variants. The new proposal builds on top of functionality added on these previous enhancements: * OstreeNativeContainer: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/OstreeNativeContainer * OstreeNativeContainerStable: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/OstreeNativeContainerStable If you would like to share feedback you can reach out to us via the methods outlined at https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/bootc/community/ and you can follow the new change proposal here: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Changes/DNFAndBootcInImageModeFedora Signed off by: - David Cantrell - Jonathan Lebon - Colin Walters - Timothée Ravier - Joseph Marrero -- _______________________________________________ devel mailing list -- devel@lists.fedoraproject.org To unsubscribe send an email to devel-le...@lists.fedoraproject.org Fedora Code of Conduct: https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/project/code-of-conduct/ List Guidelines: https://fedoraproject.org/wiki/Mailing_list_guidelines List Archives: https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/devel@lists.fedoraproject.org Do not reply to spam, report it: https://pagure.io/fedora-infrastructure/new_issue
