Re: [atomic-devel] API to leverage during the install phase of a container?

[Daniel J Walsh <dwalsh redhat com>]

On 05/11/2015 08:54 AM, Fabian Deutsch wrote:
> Hey,
>
> lately I've been experimenting with LABELs, especially to leverage
> $ atomic install
>
> As far as I have experienced it "LABEL install …" is providing some snippet which is
> run when atomic install is called.
>
> I started to wonder when I noticed that I need to manually lay out
> some service file to start the container at boot time.
>
> So - What I wonder about if there is already an "API" which atomic provides to
> a container or if this is planned for future?
>
> The problem is that the bash script approach is not really portable.
> We can not know ahead in what context the install snippet will be run.
> And thus it is "pure luck" if an install will work or not.
>
> A clean API would help to fill this whole.
>
> In this special case I'd expect a call to let me enable the container
> to be run at boot time.
>
> - fabian
>
There is currently no plans for this, although I am willing to listen or
look at pull requests.
We are not necessarily looking to grow atomic command with everything
yum/rpm can do, since some of the goal is
to move fully to an K8s model, and not sure where the functionality
belongs.  Also there is lots of work in the Container App Spec to handle
some of this.

The work we are doing on atomic, revolves around missing command like

atomic upload which allows you to upload your image to a docker registry
or a pulp registry (Think Satellite)
Atomic verify which looks at the labels to attempt to figure out if an
image or a layer of an image is out of date.

We will probably also start working on atomic mount/unmount which will
mount an image on disk without a running container, and allow a user to
examine the contents of a container.

I would also like to add a dbus interface to a lot of this, to allow
tools like cockpit to start to take advantage. It would be
cool to allow cockpit to tell the user which containers/images are out
of date.