a project by ldragon
Project Description
I recently used melange and apko to build a from scratch image. The result was a set of auditable and easy to use container and apk repository. The toolkit reduces the work need to make from scratch images with minimal work on the actual docker container(which can be quite painful if you've tried making a from scratch image on your own).
The end goal would be to produce 2 utilities. 1. A utility that can build rpms from yaml thus simplifying the rpm building process. This would not aim to replace the entire rpm spec but rather be a subset of functionality and will not include macros for now. The counterpart to this utility would another utility to produce a container image including a minimal set of dependencies from the opensuse repos.
As for the language used for the project, I believe rust will be a good choice, it provides enough flexibility along with a large collection of utilities we can use for this including but not limited to, rpm, oci-spec-rs along with compile time checks to speed up the development process
Goals for this Hackweek
The goals for this hackweek for the rpm utility are the following: 1. produce a signing keypair for packages 2. run a set of commands to produce a binary/lib that can be copied to a directory that will be converted to a rpm 3. output a rpm 4. make a rpm repository that can be used by the container utility
The goals for the container utility are the following: 1. build a container from a repository 2. output the container as a tarball 3. publish the container to a repo
Resources
This project is part of:
Hack Week 23
Activity
Comments
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almost 2 years ago by ldragon | Reply
@tschmitz and I are working on this together rpmo rpmo is what our tool to produce rpms from yamls is called. As of writing we are able to produce a build env for rpms and download the source(s). What is left is running a pipeline to build everything and finally producing a rpm rpm2container rpm2container should produce a minimal rootfs and turn it into a container using rpms. Currently it is able to produce a rootfs. Todo is generating a config.json to create a bundle to produce a tar ball which can be loaded by podman and executed.
Under the hood both projects use the tumbleweed container via podman to avoid utilizing host tools and remain cross distro compatible. We did evaluate using bwrap but we needed to use the host for zypper using bind mounts and symlinks however the container already provides the environment we require to bootstrap a build env
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almost 2 years ago by ldragon | Reply
at last rpm2container can also produce containers. Leading to the end of this POC. for future folks picking this up, here's a list of things you will want to add to both projects.
rpmo:
it should output a directory complete with a .repo file and other bits needed to make it a valid repo for zypper
support for sources other than archives(eg git or the current directory) and support for local source(eg patches)
auto dynamic linking resolution. rpmo can only generate a rpm with a set of predefined dependencies. it should be possible to do elf parsing and determine sonames the binary is linked to and report them.
signing. Currently rpmo outputs non-signed rpms and the build env explicitly disabled gpg checks both should be resolved
reproducibility. it does work in a hack way. should be made more reliable
rpm2container:
don't skip gpg checks
sbom generation
pushing image to a remote
more on the fly generation of json used in the container.
along with these both should be made to be arch independent. many vars are hardcoded to the compiled arch. this should be changed and both should support building for non-native arches. Overall as a proof of concept I'm proud of how far in a week I managed to come, and how much i got working
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