Enabling mirroring capabilities with OCI-based storage

[jaimergp]

📌 Summary

Prepare the conda ecosystem for OCI-based storage compatibility.

📝 Background

OCI (Open Container Initiative) registries are a well-defined standard for versioned blob storage already implemented by many public cloud providers (i.e. GitHub).
We plan to leverage the OCI registry on GitHub Packages to develop a community-maintained mirror for bioconda and conda-forge.

Besides, adopting an OCI-based strategy will provide additional flexibility for metadata expansion.
With this in mind, we aim to produce and capture more comprehensive package metadata, which we will later use for: maintenance dashboards, package search functions, and security checks.

A prototype mirror is already available at the channel-mirrors organization.

🚀 Tasks / Deliverables

See issues labeled as mission: mirror 🪞

ℹ️ References

• Github Packages: OCI-compliant storage on Github
• OCI: Open Container Initiative
• ORAS: OCI Registry As Storage
• oras-py: a Python library to interact with an OCI registry
• channel-mirrors organization: OCI-based mirror of conda-forge and bioconda
• anaconda.org/conda-forge: The official Anaconda channel for conda-forge