Withdraw distribution: Fedora

[debarshiray]

Distribution name and versions requested

Fedora all versions (including 38, 39 and 40)

Where are the official container images from the distribution published?

The sources for the fedora-toolbox images published for Fedora at registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-toolbox have always been available from github.com/containers/toolbox, and, historically, from Fedora's own infrastructure at src.fedoraproject.org/container/fedora-toolbox. These are the images that are used with Toolbx's built-in support for Fedora through --distro fedora, and are tested and supported accordingly.

The fedora-toolbox image was rewritten as part of the ToolbxReleaseBlocker Change for Fedora 39 to make it part of the Fedora's nightly composes and a release-blocking deliverable. The image might get rewritten again soon. Due to this ongoing churn, we have held off from updating github.com/containers/toolbox for Fedora >= 39.

The images included in this repository are different, and introduce a second set of images for Fedora. It will be good if we can avoid this confusion and point users to the canonical set.

Will you be interested in maintaining this image?

n/a

[debarshiray]

The README.md claims that these fedora-toolbox images are: slightly smaller alternatives to the official Fedora images.

Looking at the commit that introduced them, it seems that the trigger was this Image Factory bug that blew up the sizes of the official images for Fedora >= 39. However, that bug was fixed within two weeks of someone noticing it, and before Fedora 39 was released.

Today, the claim of being slightly smaller alternatives doesn't seem to hold. The alternative fedora-toolbox images in this repository are consistently bigger than the ones at registry.fedoraproject.org.

Fedora 38:

$ toolbox create --release 38
Image required to create toolbox container.
Download registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-toolbox:38 (333.8MB)? [y/N]: 

$ toolbox create --image quay.io/toolbx-images/fedora-toolbox:38
Image required to create toolbox container.
Download quay.io/toolbx-images/fedora-toolbox:38 (373.4MB)? [y/N]:

Fedora 39:

$ toolbox create --release 39
Image required to create toolbox container.
Download registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-toolbox:39 (359.8MB)? [y/N]: 

$ toolbox create --image quay.io/toolbx-images/fedora-toolbox:39
Image required to create toolbox container.
Download quay.io/toolbx-images/fedora-toolbox:39 (393.9MB)? [y/N]:

Fedora 40:

$ toolbox create --release 40
Image required to create toolbox container.
Download registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-toolbox:40 (360.8MB)? [y/N]:

$ toolbox create --image quay.io/toolbx-images/fedora-toolbox:40
Image required to create toolbox container.
Download quay.io/toolbx-images/fedora-toolbox:40 (386.5MB)? [y/N]: 

[debarshiray]

Note that the Container/Dockerfile tricks to reduce the number of layers doesn't win much for the registry.fedoraproject.org/fedora-toolbox images.

The Container/Dockerfile version of the images up until Fedora 38 were layered images on top of the base fedora image, but they were built with the equivalent of podman build --squash and had their layers squashed. From Fedora 39 onwards, the image is no longer layered and is built without any layers as another base image.

These new unlayered fedora-toolbox images from Fedora 39 onwards have the advantage of not having to fight against the minimization done on the fedora images. This makes them more featureful and it's easier to hack on them.

[debarshiray]

Submitted a pull request: https://github.com/toolbx-images/images/pull/121

[travier]

Fixed with https://github.com/toolbx-images/images/pull/121