Epic Goal

• Greatly simplify use of artifacts in Podman (not as manifests)
• OCI artifacts should be stateful and managed
• Common verbs similar to OCI images (and manifests) like push, pull, add, rm, ls, and extract should be made available to users
• Integration of artifacts into podman created containers
• Develop RESTFUL API support for artifacts as well as podman-py and Podman Mac and Windows support.
• Produce artifact support as a library for other GO projects

Why is this important?

• While OCI artifacts are part of a standard and certainly are not new, recent use cases have made them more critical.  For example, Podman machine been pulling its disk images as custom OCI artifacts for since nearly Podman 5.   But new scenarios have emerged in Artificial Intelligence where artifacts seem a good fit for acquiring MLs.  When these MLs can be programmatically pulled alongside AI based Container Images, we will have a novel approach to simplify AI with respect to containerization.

Scenarios

1. I have a containerized AI workload that has an accompanying, large ML. If the ML is on a container registry, I should be able to pull it, mount it as a volume to an AI container workload.
2. I have developed a large AI ML and would like to make this available to others.  To do so, the process is simplified to : `podman artifact add quay.io/artifact/myml:v1 /home/user/foobar.ml` and `podman push quay.io/artifact/myml:v1`
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Acceptance Criteria

• CI - MUST be running successfully with tests automated
• Full podman-remote support
• libartifact is moved to a common GH repo like containers/common or containers/libartifact
• Capability to mount an artifact into a container

Dependencies (internal and external)

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Previous Work (Optional):

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Open questions::

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Done Checklist

• CI - CI is running, tests are automated and merged.
• Release Enablement <link to Feature Enablement Presentation>
• DEV - Upstream code and tests merged: <link to meaningful PR or GitHub Issue>
• DEV - Upstream documentation merged: <link to meaningful PR or GitHub Issue>
• DEV - Downstream build attached to advisory: <link to errata>
• QE - Test plans in Polarion: <link or reference to Polarion>
• QE - Automated tests merged: <link or reference to automated tests>
• DOC - Downstream documentation merged: <link to meaningful PR>