containers
Support CentOS
There are no pre-canned Toolbox images for CentOS like we have for Fedora. That said, you can always create your own using a Dockerfile and use the --image flag to point to it.
Take a look at the Fedora Dockerfiles in the image sub-directory and the contents of the toolbox-experience and toolbox-support RPM packages. You just need to ensure that the image has some baseline command line utilities.
@debarshiray How would I do this for the Arch base image from dockerhub? I don't know what url to add after --image.
So can i make pull request for centos image? To the same directory as you have for fedora?
Currently the goal is to get the original functionality and then we want to add new functionality.
@mvalahtv, we're still putting v0.1.0 together. Feel free to check out https://github.com/containers/toolbox/pull/286 and try it locally on your machine.
Due to the change in focus of the CentOS Project, it doesn't make sense to push forward with CentOS support. Specifically RHEL 7 or CentOS 7 is too old by this point to consider supporting it out-of-the-box, because it will inevitably need fixes to the OS, which are very unlikely to be accepted at this point.
Instead, we are going to do this via Red Hat's Universal Base Image.
We already have a UBI-based toolbox image for RHEL >= 8.5:
https://catalog.redhat.com/software/containers/ubi8/toolbox/611bd665bd674341b5c5ed46?container-tabs=dockerfile
Instead, we are going to do this via Red Hat's Universal Base Image.
This is a shame, because CentOS has everything needed to build for RHEL, but RHEL itself does not. And UBI is a small subset of RHEL, though in my case that doesn't even matter. My goal today was "build WebKitGTK," but it's just not possible to do with RHEL because required -devel packages are buildroot only. In contrast, CentOS has a more normal distro setup without the self-sabotage. I think Toolbx images for c8s or c9s would be very useful, whereas UBI is just not enough to do what I want.
Instead, we are going to do this via Red Hat's Universal Base Image.
This is a shame, because CentOS has everything needed to build for RHEL, but RHEL itself does not. And UBI is a small subset of RHEL,
[...]
I think Toolbx images for c8s or c9s would be very useful, whereas UBI is just not enough to do what I want.
People can still use their own custom CentOS images. There's nothing stopping that.
As far as out-of-the-box support is concerned, we already have UBI images for Toolbox (for various RHEL and RHCOS use-cases that we can't get into here), and we spent a very considerable amount of energy getting those done. So it doesn't make sense to add another flavour of RHEL before wrapping up the UBI work.
Also, the whole CentOS Stream and UBI space is fresh and constantly evolving. So, I think it's wise to wait for things to settle down.
As far as out-of-the-box support is concerned, we already have UBI images for Toolbox (for various RHEL and RHCOS use-cases that we can't get into here), and we spent a very considerable amount of energy getting those done. So it doesn't make sense to add another flavour of RHEL before wrapping up the UBI work.
Well, the main problem with UBI is the massively incomplete userspace. If RHEL UBI had the complete RHEL userspace, then sure, there's no real reason to use CentOS here. (cc: @fatherlinux).
The questions are, in my mind are:
- Is the market aware of the free RHEL Developer subscription permitting use of up to 16 nodes?
- Is the market aware of how much easier subscription management has gotten with RHEL?
- Given #1 and #2, is it still too difficult to use subscriptions with UBI + RHEL content.
Personally I think the minor speed bump to use the RHEL content is worth the value.
Best Regards Scott M
Getting subscription-manager to work properly on Fedora Linux is a pain (it doesn't work right now on my Fedora Linux 35 system). It is also pretty much not available in any other distribution, so that nullifies 1 and 2.
On Fri, Dec 10 2021 at 01:01:15 PM -0800, Neal Gompa (ニール・ゴンパ) @.***> wrote:
If RHEL UBI had the complete RHEL userspace, then sure, there's no real reason to use CentOS here. (cc: @fatherlinux).
I share your concerns about UBI not being very useful, but even if it had the full set of RHEL packages, it still would not be good enough for me because I require buildroot-only -devel packages that are available in CentOS but not in RHEL. What I want to do is rebuild a RHEL package. This is very easy to do with CentOS, but it is not generally possible with RHEL due to the lack of available -devel packages.
Michael
@mcatanzaro ask the maintainers to ship the required -devel packages in AppStream or CRB?
ask the maintainers to ship the required -devel packages in AppStream or CRB?
Why should I have to do that? What a waste of everybody's time! I would rather just use CentOS.
It's not relevant who will do it. Your reply sounded like there's no way to go and I just wanted to be explicit about a way that exists.
To be clear -devel packages are a RHEL issue, not a UBI issue, but I get it. I spoke with Josh Boyer about this problem the other day, and it's my understanding that each SST is left to make it's own decisions about whether to ship the -devel packages. It's mostly a resource problem. Each team has unlimited wants being asked of them, but they have limited resources to accomplish those asks.
To be clear -devel packages are a RHEL issue, not a UBI issue
In fact, that's my point. Even if UBI provided everything that RHEL does, it still wouldn't be a suitable replacement for CentOS. Having an official CentOS Stream toolbox image would still be very useful. (Ditto for Alma and Rocky.)