opencontainers / opencontainers/image-spec

Any chance of changing the whiteout file approach?

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#24 46 comments 2 reactions 0 assignees View on GitHub

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component/serialization spec kind/design kind/version break priority/Pmaybe
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Go
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Description

It seems unfortunate that a new standard should use a method which unecesarilly limits the standard. With the .wh file approach, base images can no longer contain arbitrary data. This means, for example, that you cannot have an image with example OCI image-spec data stored in it. Is there any possibility of changing this to use, for example, a white out list instead. So that the files that made a layer would be:

VERSION
layer.tar
whiteouts
json

That would mean that truely arbitrary data could be stored in the images, which would be really nice :)

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Research direction

Review the existing .wh whiteout approach and the 46-comment issue discussion first. Determine whether the proposed whiteout list can replace it while preserving arbitrary image data; done requires an agreed specification change.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Domain
infrastructure
Issue type
Feature
Difficulty
5/5
Estimated time
Over a week
Activity status
Stale
Clarity
Mostly clear
Newbie friendliness
25/100

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