Update Container Builds

[lberk]

As noted from @tallpsmith on slack, the released containers are quite out of date:

Containers listed here: https://bintray.com/pcp/containers are dated April 2017.
Is there another place where the latest PCP containers is being shipped?

We should release a new set of them, and/or add them to the nightlies we look to build/provision from the vagrant builds (or azure pipelines if we go that route with CI)

[andreasgerstmayr]

https://bintray.com/pcp/containers doesn't work (anymore), where is this link from?

The current container image is maintained at: https://src.fedoraproject.org/container/pcp/tree/master
This container (based on Fedora) is taking the latest released PCP version in Fedora; unfortunately it can't be built automatically, because Fedora credentials are required to start a new container build. And the Fedora container build system doesn't support automated rebuilds yet afaics.

..and currently there seems to be a problem with the fedora container infrastructure, so the PCP container is slightly outdated. But I expect this issue to be resolved soon.

[natoscott]

@andreasgerstmayr I believe @goodwinos used to put some docker container builds there years back, but it stopped working or being updated at some point - vague memory of Mark saying something about a credentials issue he had at the time, not sure though.

"container" is one of the repository types that bintray offers though (alongside "rpm", "deb", etc) - so we could perhaps consider reviving this use of bintray to house PCP containers once more, tied to CI as @lberk suggests even?

[goodwinos]

Back in 2017, yes we used to push PCP containers to bintray. They were huge images and in the end I started having credentials issues - emails about that to the bintray maintainers were ignored. I suspect they just nuked my access or something. Whatever is there now is ancient and should be removed. Resurrecting this tied to CI should be feasible (now we're 3 years down the track with new frequently updated containers etc)

[andreasgerstmayr]

But is there an advantage of having the same container image both in the Fedora container registry and on bintray? Or should there be a different container image (e.g. with different base images..but that would just increase our maintenance overhead, and imho with containers the base distro of the container shouldn't matter that much)?

[goodwinos]

The packages on bintray are built with Makepkgs (pcp.spec.in) whereas the packages in Fedora are built using the fedora spec (as committed to the fedpkg repo and loosly mirrored in our tree at build/rpm/fedora.spec). So I guess the same would apply to the containers. On the otherhand, maybe we should permanently reconcile these two specs somehow. It's a bit of a pain to keep them in sync, especially after the recent silverblue work.

[andreasgerstmayr]

Containers are now hosted at Quay.io: https://quay.io/repository/performancecopilot/pcp
Unfortunately the builds time out once in a while, and then the automated build trigger gets disabled :(

The GitHub container registry might be an alternative (using GitHub Actions, https://docs.github.com/en/actions/publishing-packages/publishing-docker-images).