I want to know about - or rather, use - bootc. Unfortunately, the problem is this:
FROM quay.io/fedora/fedora-bootc:41
If you're using Fedora (or maybe RHEL) and happy to use premade base images then it's apparently great. The moment you step off that happy path, good luck; nobody has written the code, and the docs are inadequate to do it yourself. Or at least, they were for me; I wanted to make an Alpine bootc image but everything was shades of "now start from this Fedora image, install this magic package with the systemd integration, invoke the rpm wrapper, and it all works!" which was kinda a problem trying to integrate with a system that had none of those things. It was annoying because I'm pretty sure the tech is actually distro agnostic, but it was too underdocumented to use.
Am I not a member of the community? I am trying to build bootc images, but I can't work with nothing.
Just now, I thought I'd go check and see if it'd improved, and guess what? It's actually worse than I remembered. There's a list of distros using it at https://github.com/bootc-dev/bootc/blob/main/ADOPTERS.md - but actually the non-Fedora distros they list are RHEL and HeliumOS, which is a CentOS Stream derivative. (There's a list of ostree users, but that's not the same and they even admit that this is more of a 'hey these use related tech and someday maybe they can use this'). So I went looking through docs, and found https://bootc-dev.github.io/bootc/installation.html which again says that this really only supports Fedora/CentOS/RHEL, but does link to the issue tracking work for others to use it. That's https://github.com/coreos/bootupd/issues/468 , which is 2 years old and... basically is, again, a bunch of different folks saying they'd like to make it work on different distros and getting nowhere. There is one person who posted on https://github.com/bootc-dev/bootc/issues/865 and who claims to have converted an ostree Arch system to using bootc, but they didn't post steps to reproduce. Actually clicking around I eventually found their repo https://github.com/frap129/arch-bootc/tree/main which again doesn't say how to do it, but does appear to contain their code, so maybe I can reverse-engineer from there...
Anyways.
The community would very much like to step up, but we can only step up over so high of a learning curve, or possibly so high of a porting curve (a lot of comments indicate being tied to rpm integration).
I do see that the poster mentions that "Of course all of this is mitigated by using Fedora's boot-related packages, but that certainly is only a workaround to get it running at all."
If you're interested, I can talk to the bootc team to document what needs to be done and how it can be more clearly stated. Do you know rust enough to get involved if i can convince the group to get the party started ?
I don't know rust. I had assumed that all that was needed was to feed bootc-image-builder an image with files in the right places and it should work; if it needs to actually run native code (not just call a shell script or something) to integrate with the package manager, then it's over my head. And... also that seems like an overly-tightly-coupled design, IMHO. Hopefully https://github.com/coreos/bootupd/issues/468#issuecomment-15... (and similar) is the path forward.
I guess I will see if I can get my head around https://github.com/frap129/arch-bootc and see if that works without any terrible hacks (like https://github.com/bootc-dev/bootc/issues/865#issuecomment-2... talking about hacking the code to replace rpm with pacman), and then assuming I don't loose steam I can write something on the relevant issue(s) outlining exactly what does work and doesn't work how to reproduce it (because currently someone even trying to see what the current state of things looks like has to navigate through several layers of pages and can still walk away uncertain). My vague plan is
[x] try building a qcow2 image from quay.io/centos-bootc/centos-bootc:stream9
[x] try building a lightly modified container image from centos stream and turn that into a qcow2
[ ] try building frap129's archlinux image
[ ] write up minimal steps to reproduce frap129's archlinux image and boot it in qemu
[ ] try building a debian image
[ ] try building an alpine image
[ ] try building a postmarketos image (my actual original goal)
and either leave a trail of documentation of how to do things that do work, or else write up exactly what breaks.
Excellent, i'm sure that maybe even if you get stuck, we can encourage/get help from the bootc people to get the ball rolling again.
There seems to be a pretty big push for bootc internal to Red Hat and from my limited experience the team is helpful. Do you have a blog where you are recording your status ?
