Hi Robert,

Podman has been in the main repositories of Ubuntu since 20.10 (and Debian 11).  I think that is a clear commitment from the community to support Podman (and Buildah) as best as we can.

If users require enterprise-level support and stability, I would always recommend using an enterprise distribution such as RHEL.  When it comes to community distributions, I think that Fedora has the advantage that it is backed by Red Hat, and as Chris has mentioned earlier, there is a lot of QA going on and a considerable amount of engineering power and expertise behind.

But we really don't make a difference upstream; we treat all issues the same, independent if they happen on Ubuntu or Fedora or Arch.  The vast majority of issues are distribution independent in any case and that, in fact, is what I consider the beauty of open source: all benefit by working together.

That being said, I would totally recommend using Podman on Ubuntu.  If there is a bug, we'll fix it upstream and then it's up to the maintainers of the individual distributions to either backport or jump to the next release of Podman.

Kind regards,
 Valentin

On Fri, Oct 22, 2021 at 1:47 PM Robert P. J. Day <rpjday@crashcourse.ca> wrote:
On Wed, 20 Oct 2021, Chris Evich wrote:

> On 10/20/21 5:29 AM, Robert P. J. Day wrote:
> >    predictably, i suggested fedora would be a better choice, but
> > that's not an option given corporate choice of ubuntu for dev
> > boxes. so the question is, will that still provide a reasonably
> > complete set of container tools relative to fedora using just
> > standard packages?
>
> There's likely a MASSIVE difference in the QA between Ubuntu, and
> Fedora/CentOS/RHEL.  As in, both upstream CI and downstream
> package-level testing is vastly more faithful to the actual
> user-experience in Fedora/CentOS/RHEL.
>
> I cannot speak to the distro-level testing in Ubuntu.  But I would
> hazard to guess that even Debian's downstream testing is very likely
> superior to Ubuntu's (even if if only because it necessarily happens
> earlier).
>
> What I can say for sure is, the upstream podman Ubuntu CI test
> environment is highly customized with bleeding-edge, out-of-distro
> dependent packages.  This is required even to get podman to build
> properly.  Whereas on Fedora, all dependencies are eventually
> hitting the normal distribution channels.  i.e. What you use in
> Fedora is very close to what we test upstream.
>
> Our upstream Ubuntu CI is really more of a very basic "Can it work"
> check, as oppose to "Can it work, and function for regular users".
> That part is left to Debian/Ubuntu downstream testing, which I have
> no actual knowledge about.

  i thought as much, i just wanted to be sure. i'll see if i can
change any minds.

rday
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