Podman track

[bkmgit]

Would a Podman track be something that could be added to this lesson?

[jcohen02]

When you say a "Podman track", @bkmgit, what did you have in mind? Were you thinking effectively a separate lesson that just takes the very basic introductory material about containers from the Docker lesson and then focuses entirely on Podman?

I wonder if this might have similar problems to those highlighted in the discussion around the Singularity lesson (singularity-introduction issue #26) resulting from Podman being Linux-only at present? If the learners are complete beginners with containers, having to provide an option for Windows/Mac users to install Podman within a virtual machine inside, say, VirtualBox, or, indeed potentially within a Docker container, may add too much complexity? Another option would be to provide remote resources (e.g. cloud nodes) that learners can access during the course, but again this may be impractical and it doesn't give the learners an environment they can work with after the course to investigate things in more detail and further their skills.

I can see possible scope for an optional Podman episode that can be taught following the core Docker material - this could potentially be one of a group of optional episodes that could be developed to look at other container platforms - although I wonder if a single optional episode wouldn't provide the scope to offer enough detail?

[bkmgit]

The commands are very similar. Podman will run on Mac OS, but it requires Windows Subsystem for Linux, which is only available on Windows 10 and Windows 11. Probably an optional epsiode is sufficient at this point. Virtualbox is quite resource heavy, so if someone is running an older version of Windows, their computer specifications might not be very high.