Re: [atomic-devel] Breaking up our tools container image

[Josh Berkus <jberkus redhat com>]

On 06/27/2017 02:01 PM, Ben Breard wrote:
> Today we ship a “tools” container that’s *really* large, specifically
> it’s about 1.5 GB on disk. The feedback I’ve gotten from users is that
> it's too large to be useful and they try to avoid it. This of course
> makes me sad and I think we should take another look at it. Primarily
> this container contains debugging, performance, support utilities
> (sosreport), as well as man pages for packages only shipped on Atomic
> Host. I think splitting it up along these lines makes sense and will be
> intuitive for users. That said, there’s a fine line between some of the
> debugging and performance tools, so after looking at the package list, I
> think it makes sense to keep those together in the “2.0” tools container.
> Here’s what I’m proposing and would love feedback on: 

So, given that this is a concern for upstream, I support breaking up the
image into logical parts.

Additionally, what about basing each image on RHAtomic Image and/or
Fedora/CentOS minimal image?  That might bring the size down further,
altough it's possible that the packages involved would just re-install
all of that content anyway.

> 1) Drop all packages from rhel-tools that exist only for documentation
> purposes. [1]

+1 on the idea, I don't understand your paste output though.


> 2) Trim down the included packages to this list: [2] 
> Basically leaves the full capabilities and results in a 476M image which
> is a huge step in the right direction.

No objections in general.  We might want to look at breaking this down
further into six contianers:

- build-tools (gcc, git, glibc etc)
- debug-tools (ltrace, gdb, crash, sos, etc.)
- cli-tools (which, bash-completion, tar, etc.)
- admin-tools ( parted, passwd, pciutils, xfsprogs, etc.)
- net-tools (net-tools, ethtool, tcpdump, etc.)
- perf-tools (perf, sysstat, systemtap, etc.)

> 3) Create a dedicated image for sosreport utilities. 
> Includes redhat-support-tool, sos, & strace and depending on which base
> image we use it’s either 120M (rhel7-atomic) or 212M (rhel7)
> This may only be appealing on the rhel side of the house, but if there’s
> value for fedora & centos, it would be trivial to also offer it.

sos & strace have appeal, redhat-support-tool less so.  For Fedora and
CentOS, I would tend to see those as going into the general tools
package in (2), but don't have strong objections to it being its own
container.

> 
> 4) Optionally create a man pages container. 
> I really want feedback to see if anyone thinks this is useful. RPM & yum
> provide a nodocs capability, but they lack a docs only setting which is
> what we need. It works quite well to tar up the man-db for our existing
> rhel-tools image and inject it in our minimal base image. This results
> in a docs only container that’s ~100M on disk. It would be a slight
> hacky process to release something like this, but we could do it. I just

I'm in favor of a man pages contianer, but it might violate FLIBS policy.


-- 
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Josh Berkus
Project Atomic
Red Hat OSAS