One of the main goals of the bootable containers initiative in Fedora
is to have all the image-based Fedora variants share a common base onto
which we can maintain CI, develop features, fix bugs, etc...
While I believe in the long-term, we should try to have literal
derivation from a base image, this is not currently desirable for
various reasons. Instead, for now we can share things at the manifest
level by having this repo be a submodule in the every variant's repo.
Currently, tier-0 is much smaller than it needs to be for sharing
purposes. Crucially, it doesn't include NetworkManager. At the same
time, tier-1 is much too large as a shared target. As a first step, we
should try to match variants where they currently are and not force them
to ship many more packages than they currently do.
For this purpose, I'm proposing a new tier: tier-x. The "x" stands for
"cross-variant". This tier is composed of tier-0 + a set of packages
that is currently in common to all the involved variants. The most
notable additions are NetworkManager, openssh, and rpm-ostree.
The intention then is to have every Fedora variant `include` this tier
and have it become the point of collaboration between variants. E.g. new
packages/bug fixes/temporary workarounds relevant to all variants likely
should land in this tier instead of in the downstreams. CI of course
will also be an important discussion point.
Jonathan Lebon