@malcolmlewis1 let me talk about this from a different angle, or just give some more information.
In the grand scheme of things, we do not care that Rancher, rke, is utilizing Docker and is reliant on it. The important part of this is that the containers that are running within the cluster managed by rke are using containers that were generated with Podman.
My understanding is that Kubernetes can point to a local repository or a remote repository and it doesn’t care if the image was built utilizing Docker or Podman, only that it needs to know what image is to be used for the container.
For instance, I would like to build an image utilizing Podman and push that image to a locally managed repository we have. I was under the understanding that I could then create a manifest file that will look for the image I want my container built off of from that repository.
Does this make sense?