openSUSE Conf 2022 – Day Two: ALP Roast – An open discussion with the ALP Steering Committee

On Day two, June 3,  of the openSUSE Conf 2022 the main event was the discussion of the ALP Steering Committee with the openSUSE community. ALP, the Adaptable Linux Platform, stands for the next generation of the SUSE Linux family. As intro to the event Michal Svec, SUSE Product Manager for SLES, explained what it is all about. ALP stands for a new approach, for a new thinking out of the Box when it comes to Linux, especially to the openSUSE/SUSE Linux distro.

Michal is member of the Steering Committee together with Anja Stock, Director Program Management Linux Systems, and her team: Jiri Srain, Alex Herzig, Lubos Kocman, Pavel Niahodkin, Stefan Weiberg, all SLE Release and Project Managers. They all were available on Stage to answer the community questions.

ALP is mainly split into two parts: the workload part with the possibility to apply different life cycles for specific workloads and exchange components over the life time. And the host part that is minimale and more stable. The idea is that the host part will be stripped down to its core functionality, even more down as the current SUSE Product SLE Micro. Features like ignition or combustion should be included, everything else as minimal as possible. “We do not need Python in the base OS” said Thorsten Kukuk, SUSE Architect for SLE Micro. But “options are wide open” so far, nothing is decided yet as the Steering Committee emphasised.

A longer discussion evolved around the topic of older versus newer Python or Ruby versions. One solution could be to provide multiple versions of the scripting language in the product. Especially when they are packed in Containers a lot of more flexibility is possible then with the current Leap 15.4 or SLE 15 SP4. Agreement was also that a python version in a distro is both “too old” and “too new”, depending on which user you ask.

Another question was that it is a lot of work to move existing applications into Containers and what tools are around for that. Michal Svec explained that there are some tools around but not many yet. On the other hand there are already a lot of Docker container available, so the work is “done” already to some extend. What is also needed are tutorials and trainings for developers to help them move missing applications to containers if needed.

Last but not least Lubos Kocman encouraged the community to get engaged, to get your hands on the already existing project in the Open Build Server and to get loud in the openSUSE mailing lists.

See also my blog about Day One of the conf: Impressions from the openSUSE Conf 2022 – Day One: openQA and BCI