As far as a workflow for custom bootc images I really like what is being done in HeliumOS as my background is kickstart/ansible.
The desire is to learn the build infrastructure and to navigate it. The Konflux factory seems the one to learn now.
The image-builder-cli project builds from a pile of rpms and can be run on a base system or in a container. It provides for a bootstrap process. Nothing found on whether fedora uses this when producing bootable containers for distribution though. It has fedora support compiled in. See the copr.
I noticed that Rawhide :: Fedora Docs describes the automated compose process, which produces all deliverables including container images.
Maybe there are more pointers / clues there too.
no i mean the upstream bootc CNCF project. bootc is intended to be distro agnostic… its just starting with rpm based distros on its journey. The project became a CNCF project in like January.. so if there are builder bootstrap docs. i would expect it to be there.
That’s definitely something within scope for the upstream project to provide. They’ll definitely have to document that once they have the bits in place to break the hard dep on rpm and new, different users of the tech trying to onboard.
in the meantime, if I were gonna do it for myself.. I’d start with buildah from an entirely empty container and bootstrap my first builder container that way.
But this maybe sort of a bootstrapping thing like with GCC. We build new gcc with old gcc right? So it’s conceivable we’ve that sort of phase now where the bootstrapping was a one time thing that isn’t in the infra as a process any longer.
The from scratch process is well within scope for what the upstream bootc project wants to accomplish if they want to on board other linux distributions that use different packaging models. So that’s were I would nudge for some documentation on bootstrapping that builder image.
As far as I know, we still need RPM packages to build an initial container image.
I could try manually building one of the Base Container images using fedora-kiwi-descriptions, uploading it to a container registry, and then trying to build a bootc image from scratch using that container image. If that would be useful, I could try it and if it works, provide the steps for the process.
undoubably konflux will be a future consideration.
If build infrastructure is your jam, trying to wrap your head around konflux now, and you may be a subject matter expert that can help us integrate it successfully.
Konflux as an upstream project needs help figuring out how have an on ramp for interested people to bootstrap themselves into making sense of it.
The fedora instance isn’t get much play because honestly its hard to understand how to play with it.
Its a process, not all upstream projects are good at the educational part of growing a community around the technilogy, even when they want to grow one.