[Spike] Investigate solutions for kairos-init alternatives

[jimmykarily]

Before we jump into implementing our own solution, let's first do some research for tools that could satisfy our needs.

We are looking for tools that:

• can install software on different distributions
• leave not traces behind after they are done
• Don't bring a lot of dependencies (ideally should be just one binary + recipe)
• have a "good" licence (so we can use)
• have a good community (so they don't go out of business soon)
• Can run in a container build step
• Can bundle binary/static files in a single binary, and be self-extracting

[mauromorales]

Here are some tools to check:

• https://www.pulumi.com/docs/
• https://cuelang.org/docs/
• https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt
• a plugin in terraform? https://developer.hashicorp.com/terraform/plugin

[Itxaka]

Here are some tools to check:
* purpleidea/mgmt

this looks good 👀
EDIT: but doesnt fit :(

Want to add as well chef-solo, which is chef-infra but without any remote servers or anything.

Pros:

• deps are minimal
• most flavours have packages for chef so its easy to remove and cleanup afterwards
• should cover our use case properly
• Lots of community cookbooks, so not much to invent

Cons:

• ruby
• Cookbooks are a bit of a mess
• Databags, yikeeeees, I hate them
• It requires some config, not sure how to bundle it/handle it (ruby frontend wiht config incrusted that calls chef-solo internally?)

Also Ansible on the same way
Pros:

• Covers everything we want and more
• Lots of community recipes/roles, so not much to invent
• Some distros may have packages available

Cons:

• I dont think deps are minimal, its python so it may be a mess if we dont have the same install process for all.
• We have to install ansible and run it with a config, which can be messy.
• Probably need to download the recipes on the fly?

[Itxaka]

I wonder if we can just leverage yip to do this with just simple plugin for package installs.

will have a quick look and maybe poc

[tbrasser]

not sure if these fit the bill/are worth considering, if not please ignore me 😅

• https://porter.sh/
• https://zarf.dev/

[Itxaka]

I had a look at yip and indeed is doable:

Would looks like this, quick and dirty example:
https://gist.github.com/Itxaka/350ea3a28363761907f13f40e5e4b21d

This shows:

• yip running packages install, systemctl services, files being clean and validation
• shows how we can use the stages to declare the system state in code directly
• how we can create custom stages and custom plugins easily

this:

• does not use the DAG, as I wanted to show custom plugins and stages 😛
• shows also that the IfConditional available is not good enough for us
• shows that we should be able to create our own and easily change it so we can do ifs based on whatever we want (IfOS, IfArch, IfVersion, etc...)
• any plugins only needed for the init stuff could be in the init repo, we used to do something similar in the agent for the partitioner: https://github.com/kairos-io/kairos-agent/blob/main/pkg/cloudinit/cloudinit.go
• and I think the main issue is that we may need to change yip to add a new method to accept and generate the dag via bytes directly or stages, instead of via files as its pretty hardcoded currently to read files in the system always