Re: OSTree respository managment

["Colin Walters" <walters verbum org>]

Hi,

On Wed, May 19, 2021, at 1:29 AM, embedded justmail de wrote:
> Hi there,
>
> I'm implementing a debian based Linux distribution for embedded i386 
> and armhf systems which is going to be deployed via ostree. Having the 
> proof of concept up and running, i'm now searching for tools and 
> frontends helping me to manage the whole set of repositories (ostree 
> and debian-pkg-repos) and their content. I found some mentioning of 
> pulp (->https://pulpproject.org/) in the ostree-documentation, but this 
> seems to be obsolete (pulp3 does not support ostree anymore, pulp2 is 
> announced EOL). Is there any tool out there which helps me keeping 
> track of repo contents, 

Good question!  It's definitely time to expand the docs around this.
I put up https://hackmd.io/vTreT3K5TtSNdRWIBpIsPQ
with some more recent links - anyone here should feel free to edit/expand it!

We can make it into a PR for the docs.

I hope some of those links are useful as is now.

> e.g. which customer got what ostree-image, or 

Those are interesting questions.  For Fedora CoreOS today for example, we have several levels above ostree, 
including https://github.com/coreos/fedora-coreos-cincinnati/ which deals with "staging" rollouts per 
"customer" (machine really, FCOS is zero cost FOSS). 

> > which packages are built into a particular ostree-image?

In coreos-assembler we ended up standardizing on "build in S3" because we need to manage disk images, and we 
export the list of packages as JSON into S3 too - that's how the "package list" dropdown at 
https://getfedora.org/en/coreos?stream=stable works.  (In a web browser, enable the network debugging and you 
can see the GET request for 
https://builds.coreos.fedoraproject.org/prod/streams/stable/builds/34.20210427.3.0/x86_64/commitmeta.json )

As the hackmd doc says, right now ostree is pretty low level and it's intended to stay that way so that we 
can adapt to existing distributions, build systems etc (a bit like docker/OCI without `docker build` maybe?)  
I'd take a look at the list of distributions using ostree and their build systems.  It would likely make 
sense to use an existing one if possible, or fork it.