Hacker News Reader

Comment by philipallstar | Hacker News Reader

Is there a nice guide for podman that includes quadlets (or saying not to use them?) I find lots of guides stray into things that work on redhat, and on my Linuxes of choice, Raspbian and Ubuntu, things aren't straightforward.

View on HN

I find the podman man pages quite readable and thorough if you've had experience configuring systemd services. Good examples as well.

https://docs.podman.io/en/latest/markdown/podman-systemd.uni...

Thanks - you're right. I just have never known whether to quadlet or not to quadlet, as the centre of gravity seems to be moving that way, but that might be a redhat-first feature.

The quadlet feature is just part of podman, which consists of no more than a generator for systemd. Generators are just an executable "hook" that spits out unit files according to systemd-defined paths. Any systemd system with podman will be equivalent to any other for the respective versions of each. There is nothing distro-specific about it, especially since podman can be a single multicall binary like busybox to provide it to a system that has systemd and nothing else.

Can't comment on Raspbian, but Ubuntu LTS (has/had) a seriously outdated podman version. This is the kind of nuisance the Debian derivatives have been running into for more than 20 years: they are extremely conservative, and if that is all you need, then that is great, but if not, you'll have to either run the latest Ubuntu (not LTS), or you upgrade to something like fedora.

Is there no upstream package repo like docker has.

In many cases, Debian unstable is also a good choice.

> they are extremely conservative, and if that is all you need, then that is great

You don’t need to live at the edge of new features. Do you upgrade your fridge and your oven every two months? It’s nice when you can have something running and not worry that the next update will break your software and/or your workflow.

Sure, but these are development dependencies we are talking about. Running old versions of these dependencies block your projects. But it isn't limited to self-developed software, quite often for of the shelve software you run at the same problem.

To each their own, but this is the reason I advice newcomers to stay away from Debian based distro's. I don't intend a distro flamewar, it works perfect for `boring old and feature complete software´ like Dovecot.

To add: containers would alleviate a good part of these concerns, but the stupid thing here is that precisely that is broken for up-to-date podman workflows.

Your test system should reflect your prod system. Why run Debian if you intend to deploy on the latest ubuntu? Unless you want to use VMs. For other stuff that does not alter the system that much, you can find more recent version in the backports.

It has integration with systemd, but moreover, I think the promise of Debian-derivatives is one of "we are boring and old, but also boringly stable". Now, throwing in backports undermines that promise. I think one is better of with a distro that moves faster.

So use a static build of podman. They're readily available.

Podman's quadlets have a deep integration with systemd. I guess that if you have that kind of risk appetite you would be better of with running Arch on auto-update.

If by "deep integration" you mean "unit generator", then sure. There isn't much I've seen beyond that, nor are there many systemd features being used that version drift would cause an issue for. Static podman introduces no real risk that I can identify.

Not sure if you consider 5.7.0 (6 months old) "seriously outdated", or are talking about Ubuntu 24.04 (the previous LTS). I recently looked and decided 5.8.2 (3 weeks old), didn't have anything compelling to make me want to try to shoehorn it in.

Ubuntu 24.04. The new LTS had dropped only two weeks ago. LTS users had a very outdated podman (4.9, two years old) and couldn't use quadlet types like build units (v5.2.0, aug 2024).

We are switching our Docker systems over to using Podman, primarily to get rid of the machinations we have to do to keep "apt update" from taking down services if there's a new Docker version. We're rolling them up from 24.04 to 26.04 and just using the podman packages on 26.04.

I see, at least the good thing with 26.04 is that you are set for a while.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com