Welcome to Mezzotint documentation!

Note

This documentation covers Mezzotint 0.1 — the solution to convert a container (OCI or any other type) into an app-bundle, leaving behind unnecessary “dead code” — libraries that are never really used.

Concept

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.

Attention

Mezzotint is in its early continuous development phase and should be considered as experimental software.

Use Cases

Mezzotint use case is pretty simple, coined by a French writer, poet, journalist and pioneering aviator:

Hint

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 developes, these features will come to true one day, but with your Pull Requests, ideas and other contributions even faster! 😃

Limitations

  1. Mezzotint currently works only with containers of OCI standard. However, there are plans to expand it to the actual provisioned images.

  2. 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

  3. It is tested only on Ubuntu LTS 22.04 so far

Contributing

Best way to make progress is to open an issue (great 👍) or submit a Pull Request (awesome 🤩) on the GitHub.

And just in case you don’t know how to implement it in Rust, but you still want something cool to happen, then please fill-in an issue using issue tracker.