Craig,
I wanted to clarify a few things because I was definitely responding too quickly yesterday, so my apologies!
First, I had no idea those Red Hat repos for GitHub Actions existed already on GitHub. We're a big company with a lot of smart motivated people, with a lot of different opinions, so it can be difficult to track all of the work that "we" (the greater community as well as just internal Red Hat people) are doing.
Since somebody already built those GitHub Actions (I'm not sure who), I see no reason not to use them. At some point, I'd love to get RHEL out as a runner and then convert them over, but I see no reason to "not use Ubuntu" as Podman is a community project and people seem like they may already be using them.
Being super honest, I read your email too quickly yesterday and I thought you were a Red Hat person asking for Red Hat engineering and product management about this! It happens all the time, and you may have detected a bit of frustrationin my response, or at a minimum terseness. I apologize for that!
The confusing thing for me is, I would have thought the Communtiy repos (
github.com/containers) would provide GitHub Actions code for Ubuntu runners, while one might expect the Red Hat repos to have ones for RHEL runners. Or in a perfect world, the community ones would support both an Ubuntu runner and a RHEL runner (if I can get one created).
Either way, it's definitely confusing. I'll try to hunt down whoever created the Red Hat ones and talk about moving them into the community. I think you are right, this is where I would expect to find them as well. Let me redefine my what I'd like to see in a perfect world:
1. Get rid of repos in Red Hat repo (but, I don't want to remove them if that would break people)
2. Have upstream GitHub Actions in the /containers repos (support Ubuntu runners today, maybe support both RHEL as well someday)
3. Have a downstream, productized Actions code which uses RHEL exclusively (maybe supports custom UBI runners, RHEL VM runners, and a potential RHEL instance on GitHub in the future). This might live back in the Red Hat repo or somewhere else, I'm not sure.
Well, sorry for the weird interaction and confusion. I hope this helps.
Best Regards
Scott M