Re: fedora-minimal container and registry negative feedback
On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 11:09 AM Dridi Boukelmoune
<dridi.boukelmoune(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Greetings,
I'm not sure whether the minimization effort is still going on but I
wanted to report the pitfalls I ran into moving from the fedora Docker
container to fedora-minimal.
For starters I was surprised by the absence of DNF and I had to find
by myself, I don't remember how, that MicroDNF was present instead.
So my first bit of feedback concerns the container registry. It looks a
bit... out of shape?
I get an empty page [1] when I click on the fedora-minimal container
and as of today it is by far not the only blank page. I had to keep
opening more until I found one [2] with contents. Ironically a docker
container for another container runtime...
Even when there is content, it doesn't tell much. This is where I
would hope to get the information about MicroDNF.
The other and more significant pitfall I ran into was the lack of a
timezone database. This manifests either as missing tz information
or reports of a corrupted tz database, depending on the application
I'm trying to run. Installing tzdata was a no-op, it turns out to be
installed by default but some of its contents are removed post
installation. Again, something trivial to fix, but it should be
documented on the registry:
microdnf reinstall tzdata
There's a bug about this to split out the UTC tzdata into a minimal
tzdata so terrible hacks aren't needed to slim things down.
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1722233
By comparison dockerhub, from which I used to pull fedora images
before moving to fedora-minimal has a nice landing page [3] and
maybe it's also failing to document pitfalls but so far the base image
never surprised me.
Anything that's particularly stripped back will always be a compromise
of size vs functionality, if the stacked image did what you already
needed why change?