fedora-kiwi-descriptions

#171 Minimum version of kiwi-ng
Closed by philipmolloy. Opened by philipmolloy.

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I've found that fedora-kiwi-descriptions needs a fairly new version of kiwi. On distros other than the most recent Fedora I've ended up installing kiwi with pip. It can be a bit frustrating at times because sometimes running kiwi-build with an old version of kiwi will simply cause the help to get printed without any helpful information. I assume this is happening because a new flag is getting passed that doesn't exist in the old version, although I would hope that kiwi would print an error message in that case. Anyway, it would be nice if there were a check in kiwi-build for a version.

For distributions other than Fedora/CentOS, the kiwi project provides a repository to install the latest kiwi.

https://software.opensuse.org//download.html?project=Virtualization%3AAppliances%3ABuilder&package=python-kiwi

How should a user know whether it is necessary to use the latest version in those repos? Should they do so even if the version available to them is sufficient?

It is nice they maintain packages for some RPM distros, but they don't support Ubuntu, Debian, etc. Or for example, I'm trying to build on Oracle's cloud because they have cheap aarch64 instances, but they maintain their own RHEL/Fedora-like distro, Oracle Linux, as well as AlmaLinux. They have CentOS, but not for aarch64. And not all images are available on all instance types.

Anyway, the point is that if fedora-kiwi-descriptions requires a certain version of kiwi it would be nice to communicate that to users somehow. If I know what that version is I'd be happy to add it to the docs or as a check in kiwi-build.

It is nice they maintain packages for some RPM distros, but they don't support Ubuntu, Debian, etc.

We do? It looks like the page is broken... again. :frowning:

Or for example, I'm trying to build on Oracle's cloud because they have cheap aarch64 instances, but they maintain their own RHEL/Fedora-like distro, Oracle Linux, as well as AlmaLinux. They have CentOS, but not for aarch64. And not all images are available on all instance types.

Oracle Linux is a RHEL derivative that ships its own EPEL. It looks like my kiwi update was released there: https://public-yum.oracle.com/whatsnew.html

That said, we are trying to get Fedora added in Oracle Cloud: https://pagure.io/cloud-sig/issue/400

Anyway, the point is that if fedora-kiwi-descriptions requires a certain version of kiwi it would be nice to communicate that to users somehow. If I know what that version is I'd be happy to add it to the docs or as a check in kiwi-build.

The problem is that we more or less always require the latest shipped in Fedora and EPEL because as part of Fedora and CentOS adopting kiwi, Marcus and I have been adding and releasing functionality in kiwi. I expect that to eventually slow down and then this will be less of an issue. But right now you basically need the latest version.

Hopefully I've captured most of this in some README changes I'm about to post

Metadata Update from @philipmolloy:
- Issue status updated to: Closed (was: Open)
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