My first encounter with Podman back in 2020 was involuntary. A customer with
air-gapped RHEL 7 machines that we needed to deploy a containerized
microservices stack on. Installing third-party software like Docker on them
would have been a major bureaucratic hurdle, so I looked at what we could use
that came built in.
The tooling had its quirks — at least the way we were using it — but the
general daemonless architecture of the Podman ecosystem just felt right from
the beginning. And needless to say, the current version of said customer
project is still running on Podman today. Not only that, but many more
instances followed.
Being a big fan of good technical books, my first thought was: someone should
write a book about this fine piece of engineering. So I started with outlines,
wrote the first chapters, bought a domain, started over again, life (and work)
got in the way, and so on. Of course in the meantime quite a few Podman books
were released, and I think I've bought most of them.
Two things gave my book project enough momentum to finally reach a release
version now: my personal interest in the upcoming (now already released)
version 6 of Podman, and the advances in frontier LLMs.
AI was part of every step of the publishing process. The diagram below shows
the whole toolchain: Markdown sources and runnable examples pass a source gate
(just check), the build produces a provenance-stamped PDF/EPUB, an artifact
gate (just check-artifacts) checks the result, and just release ships
everything to Polar; just verify-polar checks what Polar actually serves,
down to a real buyer checkout with --buyer-path.
Verification of examples consists of a fast local gate on every
just check, plus a live audit on a Fedora lab host (136 recorded executions,
failures triaged into real defects vs. lab artifacts) whose report ships
inside the buyer zip.
For the build pipeline, md2pdf (a CLI Markdown-to-PDF converter that "I" wrote
independently of the book) discovers chapters, merges metadata, pre-renders
diagram fences, then runs pandoc once: LuaLaTeX with a KOMA book template for
print (cover included in the same run so metadata and outline survive), epub3
for the reflowable edition.
The release flow: one pinned commit, no flags. Both gates green, provenance
stamps verified, PDF + EPUB + a freshly rebuilt examples zip uploaded, then
the downloadables benefit is repointed before superseded files are deleted, so
existing buyers' links keep working.
And yes, it feels like cheating. But creating the publishing pipeline and
tweaking the typography alone would have cost me weeks instead of days.
If you are interested in publishing high-quality technical writing (let's
postpone the discussion of whether anyone still needs that in an AI age),
feel free to ping me.
And of course, if you want to take a look at sample chapters of the book, you
can find them on the book's landing page:
podman-book.com
(Diagrams are click-through — open any of them for the full-resolution vector.)
Originally published at sysop.cafe.
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