2023-10-12 CUE Modules Feedback Session / office hours

[myitcv]

Firstly, some apologies. The announcement of the Oct 12 “CUE Modules Proposal feedback session” fell between the cracks on our side. It was due to have been on Thu 12 Oct; we then rescheduled (in the CUE shared calendar) to Thu 19 Oct. However we failed to create a GitHub Discussion announcing either the original session or the rescheduled one! We will do better next time 🙂

With all of that confusion out of the way, we in fact cancelled this feedback session (originally scheduled for 12 Oct), principally because there is not a huge amount to discuss in person.

Instead here is a written update since the last call:

Notes since last call

• Last week we completed a CUE modules offsite focusing on all things auth. Note the bottles in the foreground are homemade Kombucha, not beer!

• Progress since the last call has mainly been focused on the backend implementation of the central registry.
• We have completed a first cut implementation of encoding the concept of public/private split for modules into the CUE_REGISTRY environment variable. See https://cuelang.org/cl/1170886 and https://cuelang.org/cl/1170811 for more information. Documentation of these will follow in later changes.
• Backend work has included a number of fixes/improvements to the https://pkg.go.dev/cuelabs.dev/go/oci/ociregistry module, including a number of fixes to the client implementation flushed out by some added integration tests.
• We also had a call with Jon Johnson and Jason Hall from Chainguard regarding their OCI server implementation, and factors we should consider when choosing an OCI backend. Note this is somewhat nuanced in the case of CUE because we will need to be agnostic of “all” OCI registry backends for the public-private use case.
• From the CUE “frontend” perspective, work has started on cue mod tidy which will be analogous to go mod tidy.
• Work on a write-up of the v3 docs has slipped, largely because of focus time on auth at our offsite. This is still on the list.

Current focus areas

• Write up of v3 of modules proposal, the experimental version of which we are currently working on.
• End-to-end tests for modules, focusing on public modules published via the GitHub App for now.
• Porting of Docker CLI auth mechanisms and logic to a package in https://pkg.go.dev/cuelabs.dev/go/oci/ociregistry. This will ensure we can leverage the same auth mechanisms as the Docker CLI (and other things that use that package) but with much lighter and tighter dependencies.
• Further work on cue mod tidy.
• Auth related work to support private modules.

Next call

The next call will be at 1600 UTC on Thu 9 Nov 2023. For more details, please subscribe to #2655.