Opinions on "Final deprecation of rpm-ostree, pure bootc"?

[Lumaeris]

Recently Jorge Castro gave a little talk to Red Hat about the goals and future of Universal Blue, and he did well! However, towards the end he said that he plans to get rid of ostree completely and go to pure bootc.

https://youtu.be/BBDOhvS_3SM?t=742

Assuming everyone is mostly using popular images from Universal Blue (Bazzite, Aurora, Bluefin), how will this affect BlueBuild?

[fiftydinar]

Well:

• we plan to introduce dnf module, which will use dnf5 instead of rpm-ostree for package manipulation (installation & removal of packages in build-time, along with other bunch of options).
• bootc will replace rpm-ostree for updating & rebasing/switching the images. We wouldn't need to do anything there from our side. Universal Blue only needs to modify auto-update timers to use bootc instead of rpm-ostree (this is if default update timers are used from the base ublue-os main images from package ublue-os-update-services, ublue-update program has this covered in Bluefin, Aurora & Bazzite).

Jorge generally doesn't want layering which rpm-ostree provides, so that's why he says that he wants to go "pure bootc", to avoid some potential user pitfalls & to make system integrity untouched. Kyle is different on this matter regarding Bazzite & doesn't mind if users layer. So it's all just a preference.

Users can still continue to use rpm-ostree if desired, until it's deprecated, which imo won't be for a good period of time.

[Danathar]

how would that work exactly? Would users need to update their repository recipes or re-create their repositories with new scripts or something?

[xynydev]

No, users do not need to re-create repositories or recipes. But if you are using a deprecated module such as rpm-ostree, you should switch to dnf wherever possible, etc.