v1.0 roadmap: alpine: switch away from ISO to qcow2

[AkihiroSuda]

• Add alpine-image template #2360

In Lima v1.0, the current ISO-based alpine template should be ditched away, and the alpine-image (qcow2) template should take over the name of alpine

[jandubois]

I don't know what you mean by "ditched away", but I thought we had agreement that we would continue to support booting Lima instances from ISO/ramdisk¹. So we would simply rename templates:

1. alpine → alpine-iso
2. alpine-image → alpine

Are you planning anything else?

Footnotes

1. I can't find the discussion right now; may have been on Slack. I remember that @afbjorklund also argued for keeping the ISO support. ↩

[AkihiroSuda]

I was thinking that we may remove, or at least deprecate, the ISO variant for sake of simplification

[jandubois]

I was thinking that we may remove, or at least deprecate, the ISO variant for sake of simplification

We already did: #2236.

I somewhat strongly oppose the removal of the ISO support. And several of the "stability" issues in the past have been caused by improper "fixes" for the benefit of colima, so that should no longer be an issue now that colima no longer uses Alpine.

[afbjorklund]

I think that the ISO/"LiveCD" support is a feature, and something that was also used by Docker Machine...

It even had Debian support, even if that was never promoted. https://github.com/tianon/boot2docker-debian

[AkihiroSuda]

I somewhat strongly oppose the removal of the ISO support.

Is deprecation fine?

[afbjorklund]

Is deprecation fine?

I think switching the default would be enough, unless you want to drop alpine-lima from "upstream" (lima org)?

Originally my suggestion was to provide multiple "editions", but I also don't know who would maintain them...

• Add Alpine examples with the container engines #1619

But don't think it's deprecated?

Possibly downstream-only (RD)

---

Bundling the apk packages:

• Make editions that install the regular alpine packages alpine-lima#107

Distro and engine examples:

experimental/alpine-nerdctl: Alpine Linux, with containerd/nerdctl
experimental/alpine-docker: Alpine Linux, with Docker (rootful)
experimental/alpine-podman: Alpine Linux, with Podman (rootless)