OCI sidecar system extensions

[korewaChino]

kinda spitballing here, but here's the idea:

Some services that would've needed to be system services otherwise could be containerized inside a system Podman container, and expose a socket on the system or localhost port for other applications to interact with, good example would be something like CUPS or something that can interact with D-Bus.

The only requirement here would be requiring the Podman system socket to be enabled, and maybe implementing an interface for this if Cockpit's container management service or Podman Desktop isn't good enough (it probably isn't since we're aiming for general desktop users)

[linear]

FYRA-469

[korewaChino]

I wonder if we could also somehow integrate systemd-sysexts on top for planting config files to have it integrate properly with the OCI services, would kinda be cool

so we would build sysexts alongside these services to provide system configs to integrate the current system with the container we already set up, i.e config files, permissions, to merge in /usr on top of the bootc base /usr

[korewaChino]

Actually I kinder wonder if systemd portable services would make sense here

https://systemd.io/PORTABLE_SERVICES/

[korewaChino]

Actually, I think we should be using something like Podman artifacts to distribute these extensions, build the sysexts inside the Containerfile so it's consistent with the image (if it needs any), Manage them using Podman Quadlet's artifact object, and installation then could be as simple as something like sudo podman quadlet install ghcr.io/foo/bar:latest, since that should do most of the sysext artifact downloading for us, possibly.

Then updating is a matter of just reinstalling the quadlet OCI artifact again.

(keeping a note here so i don't forget later)