Re: When is it better to just use containers?
On Sat, Jan 28, 2023 at 06:50:55PM -0500, Demi Marie Obenour wrote:
On 1/28/23 18:43, Demi Marie Obenour wrote:
> On 1/28/23 18:06, Nico Kadel-Garcia wrote:
>> On Thu, Jan 26, 2023 at 8:31 PM Reon Beon via devel
>> <devel(a)lists.fedoraproject.org> wrote:
>>>
>>> Are there still some outstanding bugs preventing this from happening?
>>
>> Is there any one critical feature that justifies the update? Avoiding
>> the requirement of python is... OK, maybe understandable, but I don't
>> see it as a "must-have" improvement. And better modularity
support....
>> My observation so far is that modularity simply destabilizes systems,
>> because the authors of the "modularized" tools do not build up the
>> full suites of likely necessary components. I'm running into that
>> right now with python310 back in RHEL 8 for ansible, the results are
>> not pretty.
>
> At this point it might be better to just containerize Ansible.
> Containers may waste resources and require extra effort to keep
> up-to-date, but they *work*, and that is important. They also
> *massively* reduce the test burden.
To elaborate: if I am an upstream developer for something like Ansible,
my options are either:
1. Ship a whole bunch of packages for a whole bunch of distributions
and make sure everything works across all of the various
dependency versions. This also means that I have to restrict
myself to the packages that e.g. RHEL 8 has, which might be
quite old.
This isn't so hard. Keep a RHEL 8 VM around for debugging. Set up
your CI so that you get early warning if something breaks across all
your target systems. Dial back on the neophilia that infects (some)
developers.
This will greatly help out your users.
2. Ship a single container that only needs to be QA’d once, works
everywhere, and has no dependencies except for the Linux kernel.
I get to update dependencies when *I* want to, and don’t have
to worry about breaking user’s systems. I can even ship a
shell script wrapper so that the container can be invoked as
a binary.
You as a developer are in a very tiny minority compared to all your users.
Rich.
3. Something that I am not aware of (suggestions welcome).
It’s pretty easy to see why someone would go with option 2.
--
Sincerely,
Demi Marie Obenour (she/her/hers)
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