I would like to make this part a bit more visible and understand the impact. I was recently pinged on PR to the fedora-kiwi-descriptions repository so I asked if kiwi will be used for official image builds because I missed this information before. If I understand it correctly it will be?
I’m not able to find a change (maybe I’m just blind?) for that and I would like to know more information about it.
Could someone (probably @ngompa) explain a bit in detail what is happening and goals about this switch of tooling?
Did I missed the announcement or discussion about this?
Was there a discussion with @bcl as the owner of Lorax and/or @obudai or someone else from the Image Builder team?
Some images are moving to kiwi as part of the effort to retire ImageFactory, which was announced in November as a continuation of the F40 change that introduced kiwi as an image build tool in Fedora infrastructure.
Prior to that, kiwi adoption started in Fedora Cloud in F40, and some desktop teams started using it in F41 (particularly brand new spins). For F42, more are switching over based on their respective team interest (e.g. KDE wants to principally use kiwi since it simplifies things between KDE Desktop and KDE Mobile).
I don’t know what you want someone from the Image Builder team to say. A bunch of variantss will be building their images with kiwi starting with Fedora 42, they didn’t previously build with Image Builder either but with lorax and/or ImageFactory. I’d assume there will be more in Fedora 43 that make the switch.
Image Builder builds two variants, Fedora Minimal; and Fedora IoT (its installer, not its commit). For those we are moving them off of the service in Fedora 42 (see my change proposal here: Changes/KojiLocalImageBuilder - Fedora Project Wiki).
However the fact that Anaconda is now the second group to figure out quite late in the process that all these artifacts are changing build tools does drive my point a bit more that this really should’ve been a separate change proposal @ngompa
Thanks everyone for your replies. Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not against the change but I’m not happy that the infra is moving this direction without enough visibility.
I would also like to see the change so it is visible to everyone. For example, I’m not following the thread about ImageFactory retirement because I’m not involved to ImageFactory, however, we are using LMC in our upstream testing so we need to migrate now. Having the knowledge that something like that is happening would be great.
I think more problematic this could be for @bcl (maintainer of the LMC) who need to know what is the priority on bug fixing and maintenance of the tool.
To be clear I wasn’t meaning this as a dig aginst Image Builder or
anything, I was just suggesting you add something to the change like
“Some teams/deliverables prefer Image Builder at this time, and
switching to another image format/creator is up to each of them
to determine”
Thanks everyone for your replies. Please don’t get me wrong, I’m not against the change but I’m not happy that the infra is moving this direction without enough visibility.
I would also like to see the change so it is visible to everyone. For example, I’m not following the thread about ImageFactory retirement because I’m not involved to ImageFactory, however, we are using LMC in our upstream testing so we need to migrate now. Having the knowledge that something like that is happening would be great.
Well, it’s hard to list everything affected in every change.
In this case would you expect/want to mention LMC specifically in the
change name?
I think more problematic this could be for @bcl (maintainer of the LMC) who need to know what is the priority on bug fixing and maintenance of the tool.
Let’s focus on what is changing. I’m missing change to announce that kiwi will be used to build official Live ISOs.
Something like “Kiwi is used for Live ISO builds” with a explanation of roadmap for adoption.
What was created for Cloud images is great, but I wouldn’t expect it would get from Cloud to Live because the purpose and even creation is completely different between these.
Well, I didn’t create that change, but I can see what you are saying. If you didn’t know ImageFactory was the thing that made all the lives it wouldn’t have been obvious. Not sure what to do at this point aside from trying to watch new changes and mention to them if they could be named better. ;(
The change proposed for Fedora Cloud was talking only and exclusively about the cloud image. I don’t see any mention about Workstation. It even says:
Fedora Workstation and Fedora Cloud are two different groups. We use different tools for building images today so their changes are typically independent of those we make. Currently, Fedora Workstation uses Lorax and Fedora Cloud uses ImageFactory and Oz. The cloud working group is working aggressively to eliminate our usage of ImageFactory because it is legacy code and not easily extended.
Which, if I read it correctly, says that Workstation is not taken into consideration for this change and not even talking about the this future impact.
Am I just reading this wrong? Please feel free to correct me, this is definitely an option .