apptainer and singularity

[satra]

just wanted to note that at present there are two repos being developed (singularityCE by sylabs and apptainer by the linux foundation). i may have jumped to the conclusion that singularity is now apptainer a bit too quickly.

i don't know know at this point what the path should be, but perhaps, we should now maintain both sides of the fork.

[kaczmarj]

according to the apptainer's community announcement, apptainer is the continuation of singularity. so i'd like to keep this repo as building apptainer. singularity from sylabs is a commercial product, and the name has caused lots of confusion. admittedly, i didn't know the difference between sylabs singularity and hpcng singularity. but apptainer's name tries to resolve this.

But Sylabs still has a Singularity, how does Apptainer relate to that?

When Sylabs forked the Singularity project, they chose not to rename their fork. This has created considerable confusion in the community and that confusion will just get worse over time. We decided to fix it amongst ourselves to take the rebranding hit which will resolve the confusion and allow Sylabs the right to continue using the Singularity name for their commercial product line.

Will there be continual alignment between Sylabs' Singularity and Apptainer?

Initially, we anticipate yes, but over time we anticipate that the paths of the projects will diverge as both projects continue to mature. For Apptainer, there is significant interest in better alignment with LF and CNCF capabilities like Sigstore, ORAS, and CI/CD.

[satra]

i think this repo is good. i just mentioned the issue because i didn't realize there is parallel development going on.