Re: [atomic-devel] docs-first RFE for stripping containers

[Colin Walters <walters verbum org>]

On Thu, Feb 5, 2015, at 02:35 PM, Jim Perrin wrote:

> The idea for the workflow would be that once a dev has a functional
> container they're happy with, they can (optionally) strip it to help
> keep the size down. Gross correlation here would be stripping a binary
> of debug info.

I'm sure many people would find such a tool useful.

Speaking *personally*, I have been moving away from doing package
management inside containers.  I have a not-yet-published tool
which builds containers in a more sophisticated way 
using *host* side package management.

That tool isn't ready yet (it depends on hawkey/librepo), but I did recently put together
a trivial wrapper for yum that does a subset of it (with some
minimization support):

https://github.com/projectatomic/rpm-ostree-toolbox/commit/af2ce114994e7c473ba2f7686e3ed9d01ae7c6c4

(No new code or anything interesting there, it's just capturing
 and slightly polishing a variant of the many, many similar
 invocations one can find around)

In this model, we're not using Docker layering for code - the container
will contain exactly what the RPM dependencies of the input.  A great
thing about Docker though is you can still use FROM on images
generated this way, and add in custom configuration, etc.