Packaging-RfC

[Ichmed]

These are just my initial ideas on how to create forward and 3rd party compatible packaging, please feel free to comment @isbm and @m-kat

[isbm]

Yes!

I actually had similar ideas. Except I would call it flake-build and add more stuff to it. 😉 However it would involve other tooling, like Buildah, then packaging interface (dpkg, rpmbuild, at some point most likely opkg used by Yocto etc) and even more.

Also I have in mind integrating Buildah with Mezzotint (once it works 🤣) and add some profiling system. And then where it gets a bit bumpy: every time you have parameters involved that turns into YAML, then you have more and more declarative configs that requires more and more coding.

But essentially, flake-build profile should:

• Define what is it: VM, OCI, NPK etc
• Define what engine/runtime is used (podman, runc, youki, wasm, fcracker etc)
• Say from which package it is "flaked" into (yes, original software expected to be packaged first)
• other stuff

With "other stuff" could be also a bit interesting:

• Mezzotint can be used: it throws away from a container everything it thinks is a never used junk on a disk.
• Layering and delta containers
• launch wrapper that can enforce parameters, configuration and environment to the software, fully controlling outside input
• etc

So this won't be just a ctl. I more see it as a separate subproject, which won't be that simple in a long run. But surely we can start from something trivial, like wrapping whatever stuff into a flake, resulting a Debian package for now.