Dear all,

Following advice from Neal elsewhere on this list [1], I’m requesting that the 
singularity-ce EPEL packages may be updated to 4.1.0 following the incompatible 
upgrade procedure. The justification for the upgrade is that 3.x singularity-ce 
is no longer maintained upstream. Note that because singularity-ce necessarily 
bundles many Go dependencies specified in upstream go.mod/go.sum, lack of 
maintenance can quickly lead to inherited security issues.

Upstream singularity-ce (https://github.com/sylabs/singularity) maintenance is 
limited to the latest x.y minor version, currently 4.1. The upstream project 
has committed more formally to semantic versioning conventions since 4.0.0, so 
any 4.y.z minor (y) and patch (z) version updates are expected to be compatible 
upgrades for EPEL purposes.

At present, singularity-ce in EPEL 7/8/9 has been held at 3.11.5 due to 
incompatible changes.

Incompatibilities from 3.11.5 -> 4.1.0 are as follows:

(a) The CLI has split some functionality previously provided by the 
`singularity remote` command into new `singularity registry` and `singularity 
keyserver` commands.
(b) The `singularity remote add` command now sets a newly added remote as the 
default (unless suppressed). Previously the user had to set the default remote 
manually.  
(c) The `—vm` flag to start `singularity` inside a Virtual Machine has been 
removed. This was not intended to be user facing, but was used by a separate 
and proprietary Singularity Desktop project that has been retired for some 
time. `—vm` was unmaintained, and I don’t believe there is any practical use 
outside of this context.

(d) Bind mounts are now performed in the order in which they are specified. 
Previously, image based bind mounts were performed before others.
(e) Current working directory on the host is now created in the container, 
restoring a behaviour from Singularity <3.6.0 unless suppressed.
(f) If the current directory paths on the container and host contains symlinks 
to different locations, the current working directory is not mounted.

The above are expected to have a minor impact on users. Arguably (d)/(e)/(f) 
are bug fixes as they address issues reported by users as unexpected behaviour. 
Changes (e)/(f) were also previously included in the apptainer project's 
upgrade to their v1.2.0 that was not submitted as an incompatible upgrade. 

Highlighting also for Dave Dykstra’s benefit that any thoughts around the 
relevance of incompatible upgrade policy to (b) & (c) will also be relevant to 
apptainer’s upcoming 1.3.0 upgrade, as apptainer has pulled both of these 
changes from singularity-ce upstream.

Other changes in behaviour from 3.11.5 -> 4.1.0 are compatible. Configuration 
files do not need to be modified.

Many Thanks,

Dave Trudgian

[1] 
https://lists.fedoraproject.org/archives/list/[email protected]/message/IQENLTYUAIMOTAX4LUWHYINOPSCRWCIS/
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