timoni artifact package command

[apjoseph]

I am excited about this alternative to helm. However; there is one crucial missing feature that is proving difficult to work around in my use case: the ability to package an artifact without pushing it to a registry.

Based on the docs it appears that timoni artifact push is currently the only way to create an oci artifact, but it requires pushing it to the registry to do so.

This is not possible when using deterministic builders such as nix which need to produce an artifact that

1. has a stable hash for the output
2. cannot use network during a build.

It feels relatively minor, but it totally blocks automated artifact builds in these cases.

[stefanprodan]

Unlike Helm, Timoni does not produce an artifact with a single layer, so it's not just a tgz you can write on disk. The artifact has multiple layers to take advantage of the OCI layerFS and not store the same imported packages multiple times. Given this, how would you want the output of timoni artifact build? A series of tarballs, one tar with all tarballs inside?

[apjoseph]

Ah, that makes sense.

I think the oci-image layout format or oci-archive formats would work.

Skopeo for instance can copy between a registry and oci-layout. and it appears the functionality skopeo uses to do this is published as a separate library