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Sort of, but not quite. I'm familar :) I used to be a gnome foundation member (I trained Andrea Veri on the sysadmin team who trained Patrick Uiterwijk, the cu

by SEJeff 9y ago

Sort of, but not quite. I'm familar :) I used to be a gnome foundation member (I trained Andrea Veri on the sysadmin team who trained Patrick Uiterwijk, the current lead sysadmin for GNOME) when Colin Watson wrote OSTree. He was talking about it and some of the ideas from it at the KDE/GNOME desktop summit in Berlin (2011ish) in some of the comments after https://desktopsummit.org/program/sessions/improving-how-we-build-gnome-both-code-and-human-terms.html https://desktopsummit.org/program/sessions/improving-how-we-... At the following Boston (GNOME) developer summit one of the big conversational points sans Ubuntu pulling away from GNOME to build Unity was the idea of GNOME OS because Linux was hard then. He built rpm-ostree after that, and it was after CoreOS as a distro was a thing. rpm-ostree's first commit was Dec 21, 2013: https://github.com/projectatomic/rpm-ostree/commit/958dfa435e4e4 https://github.com/projectatomic/rpm-ostree/commit/958dfa435... https://coreos.com/blog/coreos-fourth-birthday https://coreos.com/blog/coreos-fourth-birthday CoreOS as a company was created on July 13th, 2013. TL;DNR: It's complicated, but Atomic as a distro most definitely does not predate ContainerLinux as rpm-ostree didn't exist when CoreOS the company was founded.

emmelaich 9y ago
OStree's mailing list starts in April 2012. I'm sure Colin did a bunch of work before then.
- SEJeff 9y ago
  Oh OSTree was definitely around then, but it wasn’t building a competitor to ContainerLinux until rpm-ostree, which made it insanely powerful in that it could build images from existing (and pervasive) redhat package repos. I’m definitely not arguing that much whatsoever. Only that it wasn’t building a full distro in a way to put it on par with ContainerLinix until after ContainerLinux was a thing and CoreOS was a company.
  - emmelaich 9y ago
    Thanks for the info and I agree. Also thank you for your work for Gnome. Awesome! Forgive me for poking around a little more but I like reading computer history. That rpm-ostree first commit was an import from something called pkgsys-ostree. The first commit in pkgsys-ostree was only a little earlier; Aug 2013.
    - SEJeff 9y ago
      Heh, good on you for digging deeper. I think ultimately, the two were developed pretty much independently (Atomic and ContainerLinux), one from ChromeOS, and the other from Fedora / RHEL. They both prove the idea of a small container only os with atomic updates is a solid design to build a container orchestration system (k8s/openshift) ontop of. I'll still stand by the gist of my original comment though in that CoreOS was a thing before Atomic and they had a working P.O.C. before ostree was used to build an entire distro (such as atomic). Either way, we both learned something new so net win.

by SEJeff 9y ago

emmelaich 9y ago

OStree's mailing list starts in April 2012. I'm sure Colin did a bunch of work before then.

SEJeff 9y ago
Oh OSTree was definitely around then, but it wasn’t building a competitor to ContainerLinux until rpm-ostree, which made it insanely powerful in that it could build images from existing (and pervasive) redhat package repos. I’m definitely not arguing that much whatsoever. Only that it wasn’t building a full distro in a way to put it on par with ContainerLinix until after ContainerLinux was a thing and CoreOS was a company.
- emmelaich 9y ago
  Thanks for the info and I agree. Also thank you for your work for Gnome. Awesome! Forgive me for poking around a little more but I like reading computer history. That rpm-ostree first commit was an import from something called pkgsys-ostree. The first commit in pkgsys-ostree was only a little earlier; Aug 2013.
  - SEJeff 9y ago
    Heh, good on you for digging deeper. I think ultimately, the two were developed pretty much independently (Atomic and ContainerLinux), one from ChromeOS, and the other from Fedora / RHEL. They both prove the idea of a small container only os with atomic updates is a solid design to build a container orchestration system (k8s/openshift) ontop of. I'll still stand by the gist of my original comment though in that CoreOS was a thing before Atomic and they had a working P.O.C. before ostree was used to build an entire distro (such as atomic). Either way, we both learned something new so net win.