is podman (and friends) reasonably complete under recent ubuntu?
current colleague wants to set up as complete a podman-based environment as possible, and corporate policy dictates must be ubuntu, but can be as recent an ubuntu version as desired (even brand new 21.10). 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? rday
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. -- Chris Evich (he/him), RHCA III Senior Quality Assurance Engineer My personal robot overlord told me to include this signature line.
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
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 _______________________________________________ Podman mailing list -- podman@lists.podman.io To unsubscribe send an email to podman-leave@lists.podman.io
On Mon, 25 Oct 2021, Valentin Rothberg wrote:
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.
great, that makes me cautiously optimistic. this will probably wait until deadlines ease up in late december, and i dive into setting all this up on ubuntu 21.10. there will probably be questions. rday
On Mon, Oct 25, 2021 at 5:34 AM Robert P. J. Day <rpjday@crashcourse.ca> wrote:
On Mon, 25 Oct 2021, Valentin Rothberg wrote:
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.
great, that makes me cautiously optimistic. this will probably wait until deadlines ease up in late december, and i dive into setting all this up on ubuntu 21.10. there will probably be questions.
Happy to hear! (podman package maintainer for Debian/Ubuntu here) For the specific case of Ubuntu, I'm trying using the same strategy for packaging, so you should see roughly the same behavior (and bugs) between both packages (there may be some differences due to kernel and runtime). You can check the distribution specific bug pages here: https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?src=libpod https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libpod/+bugs Please use the distribution bug tracker for reporting any bugs with the packaging. If it turns out to be an upstream functionality issue, we can always involve upstream who, as Valentin said, has been very receptive in the past for any kind of reports. thanks for giving podman on ubuntu a shot! Best, -rt -- regards, Reinhard
On 10/26/21 2:13 PM, Reinhard Tartler wrote:
You can check the distribution specific bug pages here:
https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?src=libpod <https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgreport.cgi?src=libpod> https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libpod/+bugs <https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/libpod/+bugs>
Please use the distribution bug tracker for reporting any bugs with the packaging.
Thanks Reinhard for the comments and links (and for the packaging work too). Just to clarify, I wasn't intending to cast any ill-will at all, of course we're all a friendly community here to help. Mainly I was responding to this part of OP's request: "...reasonably complete set of container tools relative to fedora using just standard packages?" ALL downstream "standard packages" (even including Fedora to a degree) are going to lag behind upstream. Sometimes this is actually what you want (stability vs features). However, there's no practical option to have it both ways - it simply can't happen with human-level efforts. So OP's experience (as all downstream users) will heavily depend on downstream testing, and (if required) commercial support contracts. While Fedora's podman is more bleeding edge, and heavily tested as such, it cannot be a substitute for podman in a distro. offering full commercial support. -- Chris Evich (he/him), RHCA III Senior Quality Assurance Engineer My personal robot overlord told me to include this signature line.
participants (4)
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Chris Evich -
Reinhard Tartler -
Robert P. J. Day -
Valentin Rothberg