Changes/ToolbxReleaseBlocker

Make Toolbx a release artifact and have blocking test criteria

This is a proposed Change for Fedora Linux.
This document represents a proposed Change. As part of the Changes process, proposals are publicly announced in order to receive community feedback. This proposal will only be implemented if approved by the Fedora Engineering Steering Committee.

Summary

An up to date fedora-toolbox OCI image should be published on registry.fedoraproject.org as a release artifact, just like the installation ISOs for the Editions from download.fedoraproject.org, and there should be release blocking test criteria to ensure a usable toolbox RPM.

Owner

• Name: Debarshi Ray, Sumantro Mukherjee
• Email: debarshir@redhat.com, sumukher@redhat.com

Current status

• Targeted release: Fedora Linux 39
• Last updated: 2023-04-19
• FESCo issue: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>
• Tracker bug: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>
• Release notes tracker: <will be assigned by the Wrangler>

Benefit to Fedora

This improves the quality of containerized Toolbx environments on Fedora by bringing them closer to the reliability of interactive command line environments running directly on the host operating system.

Toolbx is a popular tool in Fedora, which allows the use of interactive CLI environments for software development and troubleshooting the host OS, without having to install software on the host. It is built on top of Podman and other standard container technologies from OCI.

Toolbx is installed by default on CoreOS, Silverblue and Workstation. It is indispensable for software developers using Silverblue to bypass the difficulty of setting up a development environment in the usual way, and is widely used on Workstation by those who don't want to pollute their host OS or wants to access a CLI environment that's different from the host's without installing a virtual machine.

Currently, there is no formal requirement for Toolbx to be usable when a new Fedora is released. For a tool that's so popular and provides something as fundamental as an interactive CLI environment, this is worth addressing.

Toolbx has two parts — an OCI image, which defaults to fedora-toolbox on Fedora, and the toolbox RPM. The OCI image is pulled by the RPM to set up an interactive CLI environment within a container. Toolbox environments have seamless access to the user’s home directory, the Wayland and X11 sockets, networking (including Avahi), removable devices (like USB sticks), systemd journal, SSH agent, D-Bus, ulimits, /dev and the udev database, etc..

Scope

• Proposal owners:

• Other developers:

• Release engineering: #Releng issue number

• Policies and guidelines: N/A (not needed for this Change)

• Trademark approval: N/A (not needed for this Change)

• Alignment with Community Initiatives:

Contingency Plan

• Contingency mechanism: (What to do? Who will do it?) N/A (not a System Wide Change)
• Contingency deadline: N/A (not a System Wide Change)
• Blocks release? No

Documentation

N/A (not a System Wide Change)