Github Container Registry tells me no description provided despite providing a label explicitly

Question

When I upload images to the Github Container Registry, I see an error that says "No description provided", which suggests the following

To provide a description, add the following line to your Dockerfile:

LABEL org.opencontainers.image.description DESCRIPTION

For multi-arch images, set a value for the org.opencontainers.image.description key in the annotations field of the manifest:

"annotations": { "org.opencontainers.image.description": "DESCRIPTION" }

Learn more about labelling container images

I'm using buildah, and I have the command

buildah config --label \
    "org.opencontainers.image.description=Claude Code on Alpine ready for rootless podman"

On my image, but this makes no difference. What's the problem and how can I fix it.

Here is a copy of the error screen I see,

Answer 1

GitHub wants an ocr1 image, which is the default with Buildah. This provides for two different places to store metadata.

• On the image (which is a label),
• In the manifest (which is an annotations).

From what I can gather, the manifest is generally preferred but that tooling isn't all adapted to use it yet.

With buildah to write to the manifest, you have to explicitly use --annotation, so it looks like this

buildah config --annotation \
    "org.opencontainers.image.description=Claude Code on Alpine ready for rootless podman"