Investigation: Allow users to use Workspaces without having to build a custom image
Problem
When users try to adopt Workspaces, one of the first steps is to specify an image to use and then build upon. However, creating a .devfile.yaml
with any of the pre-built and popular images, like bitnami/git
or mcr.microsoft.com/vscode/devcontainers/universal:linux
actually leads to a completely broken UI.
There is no explanation in the terminal or in the UI why that's the case, so if the user is not also the same person who administers the agent, they have no way to understand why they are seeing a broken experience.
Our current assumption is that $HOME
is not set, because we are running the container image as user ID 5001 and that user does not exist in the container.
Potential solution
The current approach would be to remove the requirement to specify a user ID (#469036), but maybe there are also other ways this could be solved.