Kiwi and the upcoming ALP (Adaptable Linux Platform)

[Till Dörges]

Dear all,

*if* I understand correctly openSUSE Leap 15.5 will be the last openSUSE Leap release
as we currently know it.

After that the openSUSE distributions will be based on SUSE ALP (Adaptable Linux
Platform) - again, *if* I understand correctly.


I'm not really sure what ALP will change in terms of package management, system
configuration etc.

But looking at this, I'm quite sure that for installing packages zypper will not be
the only place to go-to with ALP any more:

https://documentation.suse.com/alp/all/html/alp/concept-containers-podman.html#task-run-yast-with-podman



Do you have any more insights? Or maybe already even plans how to adjust kiwi?

I'm mainly looking from a kiwi user perspective. So ideally the current interface
(config.xml) for configuring the generated images and installing packages is not
going to change.


Thanks and regards -- Till
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[Marcus Schäfer]

Hi Till,

> *if* I understand correctly openSUSE Leap 15.5 will be the last openSUSE
> Leap release as we currently know it.

I think this is correct

> After that the openSUSE distributions will be based on SUSE ALP (Adaptable
> Linux Platform) - again, *if* I understand correctly.

yes that was the plan they shared at the opensuse conference last year

> I'm not really sure what ALP will change in terms of package management,
> system configuration etc.

Me neither. I did not fully understand what the difference between
ALP and Leap should be. However, I'm relatively convinced that there
will still be repositories with packages. I expect zypper and dnf
to be able to consume them and thus I expect also kiwi to be able
to produce images for ALP

> But looking at this, I'm quite sure that for installing packages zypper will
> not be the only place to go-to with ALP any more:
>
> https://documentation.suse.com/alp/all/html/alp/concept-containers-podman.html#task-run-yast-with-podman

There is a lot going on with containers, what exactly they do
I can't tell. It feels a little bit aligned to what Ubuntu does
with Ubuntu core (snapd/snaps) but also those are created from
an origin which are repositories and packages.

> Do you have any more insights? Or maybe already even plans how to adjust kiwi?

As of today I'm not aware of a fundamental change in kiwi to support
ALP. Let's assume for a moment SUSE stops providing package repos and
only provides a registry with containers for the basic OS. Even in this
case you could use the kiwi stackbuild plugin and create images from
containers:

https://osinside.github.io/kiwi/plugins/stackbuild.html

> I'm mainly looking from a kiwi user perspective. So ideally the current
> interface (config.xml) for configuring the generated images and installing
> packages is not going to change.

You can trust us (kiwi side) that we are not changing this concept.
I think a fundamental problem is only created if the ALP distribution
is no longer based on packages and/or SUSE is no longer publishing
repositories. To be honest I cannot imagine this and I would also
not see any value in doing this. I believe the main driver for
the "Adaptable" bits in here is isolation of applications and
atomic transactions plus rollback. I consider this a feature of
the OS and not a replacement for core concepts like packages and
repositories.

I think Neal has more insight on the plans and maybe can share his
thoughts as well

Regards,
Marcus
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[Neal Gompa]

I don't know that much more than you all do. :)

That said, I can say that at least for ALP, the openSUSE variant will
have all the packages available as inputs for doing whatever you like.


--
真実はいつも一つ！/ Always, there's only one truth!