[trialect]

The unfortunate thing is, that podman creators do not give a damn about how their binary should be run on different linux distros.

RH being RH only RH (and derivatives) supports latest podman. For example on ubuntu lts you cannot run podman 4.4 and you will never have the possibility to run it. Maybe in 5 years Ubuntu/Debian repos will be updated to contain podman 4.4, but until then you are stuck with whatever version your distro has.

[jeroenhd]

Just wait till you see how hard it is to use the arch repos on puppy linux!

The Redhat folks develop software for Redhat. The software will run fine on any other distro with up to date kernels and systemd versions, but there's no guarantee that it does because it's not Redhat's business to work on the OS of their competitors.

If Debian and Ubuntu are too slow to update, that's completely out of Redhat's control. They chose to pin an older version of a piece of software developed in a much more rolling release schedule, it's up to them to fix the incompatibilities their choice introduced. The whole point of an LTS is that you use one older version for several years.

I expect Podman 4.4 to be available in Ubuntu 23.10, as 23.04 is a bit close (current repos list 3.4.4, the version used in 22.04 and 22.10). If Ubuntu can't move fast enough to include it in 23.10, then that's Ubuntus's fault more than anything. You should also consider that Canonical sells their own competing container ecosystem (Charmed/microk8s) to businesses so not supporting their competitors' software may be intentional.

If you want Podman 4.4 but don't want to use Redhat distributions, Arch and derivatives already have it ready to go. You'll also get much more recent versions of the Linux kernel and systemd as a nice bonus.

[doix]

I mean, Arch has 4.4.1-12 in their repo right now [0]. I don't really get the argument, why is it the software developers fault that distros have old packages? Of course LTS versions of Ubuntu wouldn't have bleeding edge software, that would defeat the purpose.

[0] https://archlinux.org/packages/community/x86_64/podman/

[trialect]

So the software developers cannot make a version that can be run on any linux distrib? (with or without packaging)

(oh, and also you mean that is a community package - meaning unsupported)

[rhatdan]

Podman is a community project. Anyone can setup repos to update any distribution. Many distributions are managing versions of Podman. OpenSuse, Fedora, Centos, RHEL, Debian, Arch all supply updates. There is also the Kubic project in which community members are providing versions for Ubuntu.

Red Hat developers primary work in the upstream. There are also Red Hat engineers that work on packaging for Fedora, RHEL and Centos Stream, as well as Clients for Windows and Mac. We work with Fedora to provide CoreOS images for Windows and Mac.

Red Hat engineers work with the community for support of the other distributions, but they don't guarantee or support for all other distributions or versions of distributions.

[bravetraveler]

It's Red Hat's fault that Ubuntu is an LTS based on Debian unstable?

LTS doesn't only mean long term stability - long term suck applies, too.

The only thing preventing podman from working is the age of their source, which is a deliberate choice -- LTS

[hnarn]

> you will never have the possibility to run it

Can you elaborate on why such a categorical statement is true?

What about https://mpr.makedeb.org/packages/podman ?

[trialect]

https://podman.io/getting-started/installation "The podman package is available in the official repositories for Ubuntu 20.10 and newer." "CAUTION: The Kubic repo is NOT recommended for production use. Furthermore, we highly recommend you use Buildah, Podman, and Skopeo ONLY from EITHER the Kubic repo OR the official Ubuntu repos. Mixing and matching may lead to unpredictable situations including installation conflicts."

Also the Kubic repo is old.

I don't know what makedeb is, but of course anyone can make .deb packaging for anything, but that does not mean it is supported in any way (not to mention if a package has several other package dependecies, and those also have to be packaged carefully)

Also see: https://github.com/containers/podman/discussions/17362 https://github.com/containers/podman/issues/14065 https://github.com/containers/podman/discussions/13097

[hnarn]

You originally said that:

> podman creators do not give a damn about how their binary should be run on different linux distros

Just to play the devil's advocate here, maybe I missed something so I'll try and be verbose and start from the beginning: Podman is developed by Red Hat, and they have chosen to build for, and support RHEL (and implicitly derivatives thereof). There are no "supported" binaries available for $DISTRO because Red Hat has decided not to spend money on supporting, developing and testing for that specific distribution.

Podman is licensed under Apache 2.0 which means that it would be possible for anyone (for example Canonical, who are "responsible" for Ubuntu, or volunteers) to build and test the code for their distribution.

Doesn't it follow then that the responsibility for making Podman available on Ubuntu falls on either Canonical or volunteers that use Ubuntu, and not Red Hat? Otherwise, you could blame any developer on any software for not making their code available on any distro, and perhaps even any OS.

Makedeb is the Debian variant of AUR[1], which allows users to (more) easily compile software that they want but is not available in "regular" repos, so it could be a way to run a newer version of podman on Debian. I haven't tried it, but I believe the idea of these "handheld compilations" is to include the things you express worries about, like dependencies.

I read the links you provided, and "baude" (maintainer) stated sort of what I said above:

> we rely on community support for distributions support

lsm5 said:

> issues are best reported at Ubuntu's official bug tracker

While I can understand the frustration, or disagreeing with the decision, regarding the fact that podman is not equally available for Ubuntu (or any other distro), I don't really agree that the Podman developers themselves (or RH) are more responsible for this than say Canonical or the users themselves.

[1]: https://aur.archlinux.org/

[trialect]

Recently I came about a couple of projects on github where they are making a binary available through docker AND the so called 'bare-metal' (which expression I hate, because up until recently [ok-ok, couple of years] there wasn't any other method than just run it as it is on the hardware/os), meaning you can run it on any linux distro (without docker of course), so open source developers certainly can make software that runs on any (or at least most of) linux distros. Especially when there's a big corp. behind them.

What's more is podman especially is about running software on different distros easily.

What I'm expecting from RH is make software (if that is free and opensource and about running other software without the hassle of packaging, etc.) that can be - sort of easily - used on other distros too. But just to be clear, this expectation is not only towards RH.. it is towards any other linux distros. In this special case it is RH indeed.

The whole idea behind podman is great (especially not having to have a root daemon to run containers), but if they want it to succeed they need a proper and easy way for other linux distro users to use it.

and yes, they also said in https://github.com/containers/podman/discussions/13097#discu...: "if I want to get Real Wise. Only Supported Podman comes from Red Hat Enteprise Linux and perhaps SUSE. (Maybe Oracle Linux)"

> Doesn't it follow then that the responsibility for making Podman available on Ubuntu falls on either Canonical or volunteers that use Ubuntu, and not Red Hat?

As mentioned in https://github.com/containers/podman/discussions/13097, node.js is just an example, but they could do it. Why wouldn't redhat do it with podman?

> Otherwise, you could blame any developer on any software for not making their code available on any distro, and perhaps even any OS.

Yes you could. And in certain cases - like this one - you should too.

[f2hex]

I agree, today still better to use Docker that is more mature, Podman is half baked, lack of relevant features and moreover still very Red Hat centric, so a sort of lock-in.