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.
Instead of re-symlinking every tier-0 manifest, just include the tier-0
manifest directly. That way, rpm-ostree will already know to resolve its
manifests within the tier-0 directory.
Currently, there is both dnf and dnf5 in Fedora. dnf5 provides `dnf`,
but matching a package name is stronger and so requesting `dnf` here
still pulls in the legacy one.
This notably drops out Python from tier 0.
This is only useful for RHEL developers who want to build RHEL
containers in the Fedora host and requires a subscription. Keep it out
by default; one can always of course re-layer it in a derived build.
Jonathan Lebon