I want to create a partially managed environment for developers. By "partially managed" I mean that the libraries and tools they need for our work will be pre-installed and managed centrally, but developers will still be able to install their own preferred editors and whatever else on top.
We've been using NixOS for this, but found it inflexible and difficult.
Fedora Silverlake looks like a very promising option. We can install the necessary packages using a combination of Flatpaks and rpm-ostree. Developers can then install their own tools within one or more toolboxes.
I understand that OSTree is roughly analogous to git, and I've found that you can pull from a remote repository in a way that looks very similar to git pull. But I haven't been able to find out how to set up a remote repository like that. I'd like to be able to update some package with rpm-ostree in a central location, have everyone do ostree pull and thereby roll out the new version. Is that something that can be done in SilverBlue? What does a central repository look like in this model?
Toolboxes look very interesting. We have a rather complicated set up for local application testing, and bundling up the relevant scripts and packages into a centrally managed special-purpose toolbox would be another really nice thing to do. Does this make sense? Can/should toolboxes be distributed like this? Or should we bundle the scripts into their own RPM to be incorporated via rpm-ostree?
