We’re excited to announce that Podman v4.8.0 has been released! This release includes over 20 features and over 20 bugfixes each. Some highlights include:

• HyperV Support: Podman machine now supports HyperV as a provider on Windows.
• Heredoc Support: Containerfiles that contain heredoc syntax can now be built using podman build. 
• SQLite : Podman now defaults to SQLite as its database backend. But don’t worry! If you are still currently using BoltDB, podman will continue to use Bolt, unless you choose to manually use SQLite

For a full list of changes, see our GitHub release page. Big thanks to our contributors and community! Try it out and let us know what you think!

Upcoming Deprecation Notices: We are beginning development on Podman 5.0, which will include a bunch of new features, but also a number of breaking changes and deprecations. We are still finalizing what will be done, but a preliminary list is below. Please note that none of these changes are present in Podman 4.8; this is a preview of upcoming changes.

• Podman 5.0 will deprecate the BoltDB database backend. Exact details on the transition to SQLite are still being decided – expect more news here soon.
• The containers.conf configuration file will be broken up into multiple separate files, ensuring that it will never be rewritten by Podman.
• Support for the CNI network backend and Cgroups V1 are being deprecated and gated by build tags. They will not be enabled in Podman builds by default.
• A variety of small breaking changes to the REST API are planned, both to improve Docker compatibility and to better support containers.conf settings when creating and managing containers.