Mezzotint is an alternative solution to Canonical Chisel tool.
Same as Chisel tool, Mezzotint is also designed to drop unnecessary libraries and files from a container, thus minimising its overall size and convert a typical OCI container to be close as application bundle, keeping isolation and scalability features.
Content of a container is expected to be provisioned from a package repository and have a clear structure of package dependencies. Its content is specified in a profile as a short set of rules.
However, in contrast to Canonical's Chisel, Mezzotint:
- Designed to be distribution-agnostic, as long as a distribution is using a package manager.
- Does not need a carefully maintained database of package descriptions, which has to be specific to a particular Linux distribution version.
- Released under Apache 2.0 licence.
Essentially, Mezzotint is trying to actually follow the point of Michelangelo,
removing everything unnecessary from a block of marble to make a statue.
Both Chisel and Mezzotint tools facing the same pain point in their approach:
not everything that is linked needs to be linked, and not everything that is
packaged and thus is as a dependency, should be there in certain cases.
And to figure-out what is needed and what is not needed — is not the easiest
task to do it manually.
Mezzotint use case is pretty simple, coined by a French writer, poet, journalist and pioneering aviator:
A designer knows he has achieved perfection not when there is nothing left to add, but when there is nothing left to take away. — Antoine de Saint-Exupery
Mezzotint should be able to be used in:
- containers
- embedded Linux images
- immutable systems
As software developers, these features will come to true one day, but with your Pull Requests, ideas and other contributions even faster! 😃
To get Mezzotint installed, quck-start guide or full featured walk-through, please visit the complete documentation online.
Mezzotint is in its early continuous development phase and should be considered as experimental software.
- Mezzotint currently works only with containers of OCI standard. However, there are plans to expand it to the actual provisioned images.
- At the moment integration with a package manager is implemented only for Debian package manager, covering only "Debian family" distributions, such as Ubuntu, Mint, Debian itself etc
- It is tested only on Ubuntu LTS 22.04 so far