Allow `podman start` to take environment variables

[dengelt]

Feature request description

podman start should be able to pass environment variables to the container. My use case is to turn DEBUG on/off for development, without recreating the container.

Suggest potential solution

Adding the same --env, -e=env flags as for podman run would solve the problem.

Have you considered any alternatives?

Recreating the container is a workaround, but that is annoying and cumbersome when you just want to pass a debugging flag once and the container is initially created and run by systemd or some other service management system.

Additional context

The same issue exists in docker since over 10 years, with overwhelming community demand but unwillingness from the developers to implement it.

[github-actions]

A friendly reminder that this issue had no activity for 30 days.

[Luap99]

I don't think it makes sense to do that. From a design like that it would totally unclear would the env set on one start stay across a restart or not?

One thing that might make sense is to extend podman update to allow adding/removing env vars. This way it would be quite clear that they persist.

[jankaluza]

I will look into this one once I have some time this week.

[jankaluza]

It took me more time than I expected to finish the remaining tasks in my current team, but I've just started checking this issue again :-).