Hello Everyone,

I am fairly new the Podman community.  My name is Aric Renzo and I am a DevOps engineer based on Charlotte NC. I have a passion for container technology and even wrote a book on the now semi-defunct Ansible Container project.  I've been watching Podman, CRI-O, and Open Container Initiative projects for quite some time and I am quite impressed with Podman and Buildah providing a fantastic interface for launching Kubernetes style pods and managing them almost exactly like traditional Docker.  The community has done an absolutely wonderful job in shifting the mindsets of developers and engineers away from "Docker containers" and "Docker images" towards a more general, platform agnostic, "containers" and "container images".  Especially since Docker simply builds and runs OCI container images. 

I am writing this email in regards to an issue I opened up on the Buildah repo yesterday:  https://github.com/containers/buildah/issues/1853 .  Essentially, my idea is that if we keep using "Dockerfiles" and "docker-compose.yml" files to build and test images, it will continue to be an uphill battle to shift perception away from Docker being the be-all-end-all of containers. After all, why would someone want to use Podman to build their Dockerfiles, or CRI-O to run them when they can just keep using Docker instead? This is why I would suggest using a more vendor neutral, "Containerfile" and "container-compose.yml" vernacular instead. After all, Podman and even Docker do not build "Docker images". They build OCI container images. Hence, it does not make much sense to keep using "Dockerfile" or "docker-compose.yml" files.

However, since I opened this issue, I have been thinking that while this would be a relatively easy code change to get Podman/Buildah to recognize the presence of "Containerfile" inside a repo and build it, this is far more of a cultural shift more than anything else.    I think that if the community decides to go this direction, it would be helpful for Podman and other OCI projects to evangelize and promote a new standard for setting up the general instruction file to build and ship open container images. 

I am open to thoughts and feedback regarding this.   I'm wondering if using a standard like this while great for Podman/Buildah to adopt is more of an open container initiative community discussion as well? I'm curious about what the Podman community thinks?

Thank you for your time.   I'm excited to meet and interact with everyone in the community.

Thanks,

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