Dne 13. 06. 22 v 18:45 Jan Engelhardt napsal(a):

So instead of having to install yast2 (zypper tells me 11 MB), I now have to podman (25 MB).

Of course, using containers is not for free, it needs some container runtime. It depends what you already have installed in your system. If you already have Ruby (e.g. because you develop a Ruby on Rails app) then the needed YaST size would even go down. Similarly with podman. But it seems that the future is in containerization of apps, so podman (or a similar tool) will be very likely installed anyway.

It's logically backwards that one is supposed to run Y2 in a container, only to have it go outside again. Containers are not supposed to affect the host system.

It depends what you want to do. Usually you want a container to work in isolated environment. But running YaST in an isolated container (without host system interaction) is pointless. And there are already some other tools which run in a container but affect the host system, e.g. the Portainer (https://www.portainer.io/) which is a Docker manager running inside a Docker container managing the host Docker instance. So this approach is not that unusual as it might seem on the first sight.

So you have to widen the namespace to the point that it _is_ the host system, mounts included, at which point you could have just installed Y2.

Um, yes. But the point is that the YaST dependencies cannot collide with the system. SLES still ships with Ruby 2.5, in theory the YaST container could use newer Ruby 3.1 and we could use some new Ruby features there. And that applies to any other used library. Also the host system could contain even less packages, for example you do not need zypper/libzypp in the host system, even rpm (!) itself is not required if you run the YaST package manager in a container. (I have tested this in real!) Another advantage is that you can get rid of YaST just with a simple "docker/podman rmi" command and you can be sure it won't break any system dependencies or uninstall something you actually need (like Ruby for your Ruby on Rails app). Containerization has both pros and cons. But we think the pros will be more important in the future and the cons will be just minor issues or completely disappear.... -- Ladislav Slezák YaST Developer SUSE LINUX, s.r.o. Corso IIa Křižíkova 148/34 18600 Praha 8