Re: [BuildStream] Proposal: OCI image source plugin

[Chandan Singh <chandan chandansingh net>]

Hi all,

I think it is a great idea to add support for loading OCI images so
definitely +1 on the proposal.

A couple of points I'd like to add.

I too noticed the announcement about OCI registry specification being
included in the next version but personally, I won't count on that
happening in the short term. So, we might have to support both OCI and
Docker for now. Although in future, once there is enough
standardization around the registry API, we can definitely consider
merging them into a single plugin.

Even if the OCI specification comes soon-ish, I am not convinced that
popular implementations (like Docker) will support it fast enough. For
example, this issue [0] has been open for over 2 years to have `docker
load` support OCI image format but is not fixed yet.

So, I think the Docker and OCI plugin can coexist for some time. The
Docker plugin should probably move to BuildStream proper sometime soon
but that is a separate topic.

That said, I definitely think there is some scope for reuse of some
logic between the two plugins, somewhat similar to how we have
`_downloadablefilesource` that is shared by several source plugins.

Daniel, I have some experience with OCI images so let me know if you
need any help :)

[0]: https://github.com/moby/moby/issues/25779

Cheers,
Chandan
On Wed, Oct 10, 2018 at 12:50 PM Daniel Silverstone via
BuildStream-list <buildstream-list gnome org> wrote:
> On Wed, Oct 10, 2018 at 17:40:31 +0100, Javier Jardón wrote:
> > Is this going to be a generalization of the docker source plugin [1]
> > or a completely new one?
>
> That's an interesting question.  The docker source plugin, quite naturally,
> uses/supports a docker registry which is specific to docker rather than
> entirely generic to OCI, though as Sander noted by referring to
> https://blog.docker.com/2018/04/docker-registry-api-standardized-oci/ there is
> the intention to standardise the docker registry API for OCI though as far as I
> can tell there hasn't been an official release of this so we know for sure how
> we'll interact with officially OCI compliant registries yet.
>
> However, the core functionality of the docker source plugin is definitely
> similar to the OCI specification (as you might expect) so perhaps an extension
> of this plugin may be appropriate.
>
> Thank you for raising this to my attention.
>
> D.
>
> --
> Daniel Silverstone                          https://www.codethink.co.uk/
> Solutions Architect               GPG 4096/R Key Id: 3CCE BABE 206C 3B69
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-- 
Regards,
Chandan Singh
http://chandansingh.net/