| > build/package Podman as part of their OS release process. But that is notoriously out-of-date. providing duplicate/additional non official builds for other OS is - undermining the OSes package curation - confusing for the user - cost additional developer time, which for most OSS is fairly limited - for non vendorable system dependencies this additional dev time cost can be way higher in all kinds of surprising ways - obfuscate if a Linux distro is in-cable of properly maintaining their packages - lead to a splitting of the target OS specific eco system of software using this as a dependency etc. it's a lose lose lose for pretty much everyone involved so as long as you don't have a have a monetary reason that you must do it (like e.g. docker has) it's in my personal opinion a very dump thing to do I apologize for being a bit blunt but in the end why not use a Linux distribution which works with modern software development cycles? Blaming others for problems with the OS you decided to use when there are alternatives seems not very productive. |
Mostly agree. But something like Podman w/ RedHat behind it is unlikely to be limited in the same way a lot of community OSS projects are.
Unfortunately, I disagree with just about every other point you made but don't think it's worth responding point-by-point. In short, I think a project having dedicated builds for popular OSes is a win-win for just about everyone, excepting that it does take, sometimes a considerable amount of, effort to support those cross OS builds. Additionally, there are now options like Snap/Flatpack/AppImage that can be targets instead of the OS itself, although there is admittedly a tradeoff there as well.
For some projects, say something like ripgrep, just using what is in the OS repo is fine because having the latest and greatest features/bug-fixes is unlikely to matter to most people using the tool.
But, on something like Podman, where there is so many pieces, it's a relatively new technology, and the interaction between Kernel, OS, and user space is so high, being stuck with a non-current OS provided release for a couple years is a non-starter.
> why not use a Linux distribution which works with modern software development cycles?
Because I like my OS to be stable, widely supported, and I also like some of my applications to be evergreen. I find Ubuntu is usually a really good mix that way and I'm going on 15+ years of use. There are other solutions for that that I could use, but I'm mostly happy where I am and don't want to spend the kind of time it would take to adopt a different OS and everything that would follow from that.
That leads _me_ to avoid Podman currently. I can appreciate that you have a different opinion, I just think you are a overplaying your perspective a bit in the comment above.