Nice overview. I'm curious about the need for (some) acbuild commands to run as root, though. Does anyone know if this is just in order to be able to call chroot? The example linked in the article doesn't go into detail:
I can't see why building an image file would require root -- all in all it's just about writing some kind of archive to disk, isn't it? A cursory glance at the rkt-project documentation didn't get me any closer than the equivalent of "some sub-commands require root".
It's only the run that requires root subcommand and its because it uses systemd nspawn to run the command inside the image your building. Not ideal but it's how it works for now.
https://github.com/lukebond/demo-api/blob/master/appc.sh
I can't see why building an image file would require root -- all in all it's just about writing some kind of archive to disk, isn't it? A cursory glance at the rkt-project documentation didn't get me any closer than the equivalent of "some sub-commands require root".