Request to add buildah and skopeo
Closed this issue · 2 comments
@mgoltzsche This is not an issue. Request to add static buildah and skopeo packages, might be as another package like podman-tools or build-tools
https://github.com/containers/buildah
https://github.com/containers/skopeo
@srbala initially this repository's podman image provided buildah and skopeo binaries but I removed them in favour of a more minimalistic image that could be extended when needed as opposed to a fat image that contains everything somebody may need eventually (see #1).
Why do you need skopeo within the podman image? podman can pull/push/copy images as well using the same library skopeo uses. I think, unless you rely on buildah CLI commands podman does not expose, you also don't need the buildah binary when you're working with podman already which has buildah built-in as a library since podman 2. Though of course there are cases where you'd still favour buildah over podman but in that case you can use a separate buildah image (e.g. the official quay.io/buildah/stable image).
Since both buildah and podman still require a few more privileges than what is available in some environments skopeo and umoci can be an alternative. However in those cases you wouldn't be able or don't want to use podman or buildah anyway so why put it into the same image?
Bloated images are badly maintainable and don't grant users granular control over the versions of the contained binaries. Therefore they are considered a bad containerization practice that can be resolved by splitting (build) tasks into separate steps that are run by separate containers (or mounting binaries from multiple images together into a single container like GitHub Actions does it apparently). While the podman image still consists of many binaries all of them are podman dependencies, serving a single purpose: allowing to run podman.
If you mean "another package" in terms of another image I agree but I think it should be maintained within another repository then.
@mgoltzsche thank you for quick response. I agree to the idea of build as needed.