Repo seems abandoned, is it?

[TriplEight]

Can I draw some attention to #140 please?

[faust64]

The Can't pull image: invalid character '<' looking for beginning of value very much sounds like the (new) rate limit errors you would get from docker.io. The FROM in that dockerfile is otherwise perfectly fine.

As of late 2020, docker wants to make more money out of their registry: https://docs.docker.com/docker-hub/download-rate-limit/
You could switch to quay.io or gcr.io when you can, mirror the rest to some registry of yours (docker-registry, nexus, artifactory, katello, ....). And for sure, GitLab -- even gitlab.com offers a perfectly fine registry.

I guess the reason gitlab-ci would seem to fix it might be, AFAIU, that the image is being pulled by another IP, that was not yet rate-limited?

Now there's a case to be made, about this repository maybe being abandoned, in #174 .

[TriplEight]

Thanks for answering!
That error with < points to some difference in the manifest that's produced by buildah. I've ran it multiple times and it always works with docker and never works with buildah.