Fedora template maintenance

[ganto]

I lately put some effort in creating community packages for LXD on Fedora and therefore I also had a look at the lxc-fedora template in LXC. It's a very feature rich template that still works fine also with newer Fedora releases but it hasn't seen much love lately (maybe because of its complexity?).

To get know the template a bit better I ported the bootstrapping part for non-yum distributions from the currently used Fedora 20 squashfs image to the Fedora 24 image and therefore was able to get rid of some complexity (see my fedora branch). By dropping python (dnf now requires python-3), yum, rsyslog and chkconfig, I was able to reduce the image size from 230MB to around 160MB, what I think is a big win.

However, the shift to dnf made me think of some issues with the current code paths that I would like to address here:

• Is it worth to put more effort in updating the lxc-fedora template or is this something that might not be widely used anymore with the availability of the Fedora CloudImages?

• Are there users which use this template to build containers of unsupported versions (non-dnf, non-systemd) of Fedora?

• Getting rid of all this compatibility code for old Fedora versions would simplify the template quite a bit. Would you be interested if I put some effort in doing this?

Please let me know what you think.

[brauner]

I would vote for getting rid of the complexity. (@stgraber)

[stgraber]

1. I don't think too many people use the fedora cloud images since there's no straightforward way to turn those into LXC containers (no template script). I'm not opposed changing lxc-fedora to just repack those images though.
2. It's hard to know what our users do, but I'd say it's certainly not worth keeping a lot of complexity for such corner cases.
3. Assuming that "old" here means no longer supported, I'm absolutely fine with removing that code.

[ganto]

Ok, thanks for your reply. I will work on a suggestion for a new template in the next few days and maybe also try out how this would work when converting a CloudImage.

[brauner]

The template has been completely reworked and merged. This can be closed.