[Container-tools] Improving the atomic.app developer experience

[Josh Berkus]

Folks,

So as of 1.0, we will have an excellent packager format for 
Atomic/Nulecule apps and the Atomic platform.  However, what we will not 
have is a tool which makes it easier for developers to package their 
applications.  I think that's something we can do, but we'll need to 
build 2.0 to do it.  The goal is to have an atomic.app which saves 
developers work, so that they *want* to use it.

Here's the main areas I can see where we can make atomic.app better for 
developers in priority order:

1. File Generation:  right now atomic.app requires typing out/copying 
multiple files in multiple locations, most of which are duplicative of 
standard templates or each other.  Really, we should be able to take 
just a tree file alone from the user and generate all of the other 
files, except in the "advanced" cases.  All of the other files are 
derivative of that tree file and 3rd-party APIs.

2. Security and Permissions: we need a way for developers to be able to 
use their chosen tools on their desktop, but still use atomic.app to 
build apps (see prior email).  As a bonus, we could offer the ability to 
set SELinux permission requirements as part of the atomic.app format; 
that would not only make atomic.app valuable, it would ease the tendency 
of developers to just disable SELinux.

3. Integrated Image Build: as the next step, it would really help 
developers if we could build their images (e.g. myuser/mywebapp), 
register them, and then deploy them via atomic app as one command.  This 
would mean that users would just provide a tree file and a set of source 
code repos (with dockerfiles) and one command would do the rest.

Now, I'm not wedded to any particular way to accomplish the above; 
whether it's via atomic.app, Cockpit integration, or even Ansible is 
fine with me as long as the installation and the steps are simple.

Thoughts?

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Josh Berkus
Project Atomic
Red Hat OSAS