I don’t think the proposed change makes sense basically because the 99% case for our base images is…well, using them as base images to make a new derived image.
And when you do e.g. FROM fedora and podman build, the compression for the derived image becomes whatever the engine default is (for docker and podman today: gzip)…so in the end we’re not really going to change much. Anyone who wants to opt-in to zstd:chunked today needs to either explicitly configure it or inherit the current global change in f41 to default to zstd:chunked…which is still going to cause a lot of problems until we get bootc support for it.
IMO the best approach here remains Add compression_format = inherit · Issue #5586 · containers/buildah · GitHub