What you're describing is pretty much contrary to the philosophy behind podman, buildah, skopeo, etc. though which is to have fairly narrowly scoped tools that serve a specific purpose rather than a big application that does everything.
Podman does allow you to build containers, but my suspicion is it’s intended for easier transitioning from docker (you can alias docker=podman and it just works). Also the build functionality is basically an alias for “buildah bud” so it’s more of a shortcut to another application than re-implementing the same functionality.
Edit: more reading on the intended uses of each tool if you feel like understanding them better https://podman.io/blogs/2018/10/31/podman-buildah-relationsh...
> Some of the commands between the two projects overlap significantly but in some cases have slightly different behaviors. The following table illustrates the commands with some overlap between the projects.
And this makes no sense at all if you’re purposely designing a tool.
That functionality probably wouldn't be necessary at all if Docker didn't pollute the common understanding of containers in the first place.
What is blurry to you about the purpose of either tool?
> Each project has a separate internal representation of a container that is not shared. Because of this you cannot see Podman containers from within Buildah or vice versa.
> Mounts a Podman container. Does not work on a Buildah container.
^ this here is one of the problems, the containers are not compatible is my interpretation.
The tool feature sets overlap with subtle differences according to the article, that blurs the line on what each one is for. They need to pick a direction, if you’re making a build tool and a run time, the the build tool must only build, and the run time must only run, or just make one tool. Intentional and truthful (meaning the words mean only what they say) design limits the chaos that happens in the wild, these tools aren’t doing that. It may seem clear to you, but the article is littlerly about how it’s not clear and how they overlap confusingly. So you’re going to come across a mess at some point due to this mistake, that or they could explain their rationale for the overlap but they don’t.
Buildah containers and buildah run are far different in concept then podman run is. Buildah run == Dockerfile RUN. So we don't support a lot of the additional commands that are available for podman run and have decided to keep the format different. Podman has a large database, that we felt would confuse matters when it came to podman run.
I tell people if you just want to build with Dockerfiles, then just use podman, and forget about buildah. Buildah and its library are for building OCI images and hopefully embedding into other tools in addition to podman like OpenShift Source2Image and ansible-bender. As well as allowing people to build containwer images using standard BASH commands rather then requiring everyone to use Dockerfile. Podman build only supports Dockerfile.
Why are you concerned about buildah’s internal representation of a container, unless you’re contributing to the codebase?
If you break containers down into three main jobs, with a sort of forth meta-job:
RUN (& FIND) - podman BUILD - Buildah SHARE - Skopeo
If you think about it, that's what made docker special, it was the ability to FIND, RUN, BUILD, and SHARE containers easily. So, that's why we have small tools that map to those fairly easily.