#20691 Document Podman support Issue created by huonw Describe the bug In #20470, we added support for Podman. It seems like this is automatically enabled if the

pants.backend.experimental.docker.podman

backend is loaded, but can be disabled with https://www.pantsbuild.org/2.20/reference/subsystems/docker#experimental_enable_podman. In addition, option is only available when the backend is added, but this isn't obvious from the docs, so I imagine people may try setting

experimental_enable_podman = True

without the backend and get confusion. This process doesn't seem to be described in the docs anywhere, e.g. no mention of Podman in https://www.pantsbuild.org/2.20/docs/docker, and I don't think the

pants.backend.experimental.docker.podman

appears in the docs either, since there's no subsystem or similar associated with it, just that option. Suggestion: one or more of: • expand the docs of

experimental_enable_podman

to describe how to load the backend • add description to the main docker text docs • fold this into the

pants.backend.experimental.docker

completely (the majority of the support has to be hard-coded into it, anyway) without the extra backend. The

experimental_enable_podman

option would move into this backend and then flip to defaulting to

False

, so someone could enable Podman by setting that option, rather than loading the new backend. (This is related to documentation because it would simplify what we need to describe to users) Pants version 2.20 OS N/A Additional info N/A pantsbuild/pants