toolbox/GOALS.md

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<img src="data/logo/toolbox-logo-landscape.svg" alt="Toolbox logo landscape" width="800"/>
## Goals
### High Level Goals
- Provide a convenient command line interface to run containers using
[Podman](https://podman.io/)
- Support for development, debugging and system management use cases
- Support for multiple distros
- `toolbox` package in multiple distros
- `toolbox` containers for multiple distros
### Non-goals
- Supporting multiple container runtimes. Toolbox will use Podman exclusively
- Adding significant features on top of Podman
- Significant feature requests should be driven into Podman upstream
- To run containers that aren't tightly integrated with the host
- Extremely sandboxed containers quickly become specific to the user
### Developer Use Cases
- Im a developer hacking on source code and building/testing code
- Most cases: user doesn't need root, rootless containers work fine
- Some cases: user needs root for testing
- Desktop Development:
- Developers need things like D-Bus, display, etc. to be forwarded into the
toolbox container
- Headless Development:
- Toolbox works properly in headless environments (no display, etc)
- Need development tools like GDB, strace, etc. to work
### Debugging and System Management Use Cases
- Inspecting host processes and the kernel
- Typically need root access
- Need bpftrace, strace on host processes to work
- Ideally even do things like helping get kernel-debuginfo data for the
host kernel
- Managing system services
- `systemctl restart foo.service`
- journalctl
- Managing updates to the host
- rpm-ostree
- dnf/yum (classic systems)
### Specific environments
- Fedora Silverblue
- Silverblue comes with a subset of packages and discourages host software
changes
- Users need a toolbox container as a working environment
- Future: use toolbox container by default when a user opens a shell
- Fedora CoreOS
- Similar to Silverblue, but non-graphical and smaller package set
- RHEL CoreOS
- Similar to Fedora CoreOS. Based on RHEL content and the underlying
operating system for OpenShift
- Need to [use default authfile on pull](https://github.com/coreos/toolbox/pull/58/commits/413f83f7240d3c31121b557bfd55e489fad24489)
- Need to ensure compatibility with the rhel7/support-tools container
- Currently not a toolbox image, opportunity for collaboration
- Alignment with `oc debug node/` (OpenShift)
- `oc debug node` opens a shell on a kubernetes node
- Value in having a consistent environment for both Toolbox's debugging
mode and `oc debug node`