moby-engine (also known as Docker) maintenance in Fedora

[Timothée Ravier]

Hi everyone,

The moby-engine package [1] (also known as Docker) has been orphaned in Fedora and is looking for a new maintainer. The waiting period will soon be over and the package will be retired if nobody steps in.

This means that the package will be unavailable starting with the next release of Fedora (Fedora 38) that should happen in approximately 5 to 6 months.

If you are using this package and are interested in helping maintaining it, now is the time to come forward!

This notably impacts Fedora CoreOS as we are including the moby-engine package by default to let users pick their container engine of choice whithout deciding for them in advance. We offer both major container engines by default in the image (podman and moby-engine).

If the moby-engine package ends up being retired for Fedora 38, then we will have to recommend to its users on Fedora CoreOS that they either switch to the official Docker packages [2] or move to containerd or podman when the rebase to Fedora 38 happens alongside the Fedora 38 release [3].

Note that we will likely not remove the containerd package from Fedora CoreOS as it is still maintained in Fedora and is currently used by Kubernetes distributions based on Fedora CoreOS (such as Typhoon for example).

See also the Fedora CoreOS tracker issue [4] for more details.

[1] https://src.fedoraproject.org/rpms/moby-engine
[2] https://docs.docker.com/engine/install/fedora/
[3] https://fedorapeople.org/groups/schedule/f-38/f-38-key-tasks.html
[4] https://github.com/coreos/fedora-coreos-tracker/issues/1291

Thanks,

Timothée Ravier for the Fedora CoreOS team