Dependencies inconsistent with crun

[phlummox]

Currently, the installation instructions for building Podman from source say that pkg-config is a prerequisite for building Podman on Ubuntu, but they also suggest that it may be necessary to build crun or runc from source if the version isn't recent enough (which in my case it wasn't) – and the build instructions for crun state that pkgconf needs to be installed to build crun.

At least on Ubuntu 20.04, it's not possible to have both pkgconf and pkg-config installed at the same time. Is pkgconf sufficient for building Podman, or do I have to install pkgconf, build crun, then uninstall pkgconf and install pkg-config before I build Podman?

I also wondered why there was this inconsistency, when both Podman and crun are projects in the containers GitHub organisation – should one or the other be amended so that they're both the same?

[TomSweeneyRedHat]

Sorry @phlummox, this fell into my bit bucket, and unfortunately, I don't have the Ubuntu savvy to answer the questions. @lsm5 do you by chance know or know who might?

[lsm5]

@giuseppe PTAL. do you know if the crun build instructions can use pkg-config instead of pkgconf on ubuntu?

[giuseppe]

I think pkg-config should be fine.

@phlummox have you tried building crun with pkg-config? Have you found any issue?

[phlummox]

I haven't tried building crun with pkg-config yet. I'll let you know once I do.

[jklaiho]

Just a heads up to anyone who runs into this: I've found that the binary available at https://github.com/containers/crun/releases/download/<VERSION>/crun-<VERSION>-linux-amd64 works just great on Ubuntu 22.04. Thanks to this, I have not needed to try to build crun from source, while I do build conmon (due to lack of journald logging support on the binary release, see containers/conmon#348) and Podman itself.

In addition to crun, I'm able to use the binary releases of netavark and aardvark-dns as-is.

[phlummox]

Apologies, I haven't had a chance to come back to this. @jklaiho, it's definitely good to hear that the downloadable binaries work well on Ubuntu. But I also think it's reasonable for an open-source project to make it clear how users can build their own binaries, rather than relying on a third party's. cheers.

[giuseppe]

crun uses automake/autoconf, so if you have the correct libraries installed it is just a matter of running ./autogen.sh && ./configure && make. More details are in the crun README.md file.