Podman v2.x is under development and due to the development, some of the upstream commands may become unstable for a period of time until the final release is completed. More details in the announcement post.
In the last few days, the Podman development team has been working to release Podman-1.9.0. This is likely to be the last Podman-1.X release before we transition to Podman v2.x. We have been working since November 2019 to make a significant overhaul of Podman’s architecture. And if we did our job correctly, most casual Podman users will not notice a difference. We will continue to investigate and fix issues in Podman-1.x versions but severity of the bug and priority will dictate our response.
What some users who follow upstream development may notice is that while we make the final push to a 2.x release, our GitHub repository will look drastically different. For some period of time, certain Podman commands, if built based on upstream, may not function exactly as expected nor even exist. We already know we will need to disable some of our CI testing framework as part of this final push until we have a more complete Podman v2.x. We will not release Podman 2.0 until we are satisfied that it is ready. While upstream development will be impacted by the announced migration to Podman v2.x, you can still open issues and contribute pull requests to the project.
As has been the standard with our project, we will remain transparent in our development activities and try to keep our community appraised of our progress. We are excited for some of the technical advancements that Podman v2.x will give our users. Subsequent blog posts will be written on those advancements and why they matter to our users.
If you follow the traffic on IRC (#podman on libera.chat) or GitHub from the developers of libpod, you might have seen us referencing a new API. We often referred to it as apiv2 and for about a month, there has been an 'apiv2' branch for libpod on GitHub. This week, we have begun to merge that branch but have yet to “wire it up.”
First and foremost, the Golang libpod API remains largely unchanged. What is changing is the API we expose for automation and remote usage. Our previous API was based on the varlink protocol. But we heard from users that varlink was a hurdle for libpod adoption especially for those who were using the Docker API and its bindings. They simply could not or did not want to rewrite their custom applications for libpod’s new, varlink-based API.