cnf-lib - Library code for cnf

The code contained here serves three main purposes.

Handling environments

An "environment" is anything that offers one or more "providers" (see below). At the moment, regular Linux hosts, toolbx containers and distrobox containers are supported environments, although this may change in the future.

It is often desirable to temporarily escape one environment for the sake of executing a single command. There are usually controlled mechanisms to perform this task. This crate aims to transparently manage the command translation necessary in order to, for example, execute htop inside a toolbx container while working on the host. All of this is implemented in the Environment type.

Have a look at the documentation and code in src/environment if you want to know more about this command translation.

Handling providers

A "provider" is anything that offers executable software. This includes for example the system $PATH (where executables are usually located and can be executed immediately), but extends to regular package managers such as dnf, usually requiring installation of commands before they can be executed.

Providers can be searched for a command and return a list of zero or more possible candidates matching the search term. All of this is implemented in the Provider type.

Handling command invocations

Translating regular command lines between environments has a few pitfalls with respect to e.g. privilege escalation and correctly reading stdout/stderr. The CommandLine type provides the necessary abstractions to allow seamless command execution without having to wonder how privilege escalation in the target environment works, for example.