bitshift
Joined 14 years ago
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Member since
Mar 30
Recent submissions
Comment · 7 years ago
Comment · 13 years ago
He is 79 years old, retired, and he is still delivering. The ultimate computer scientist?
Comment · 14 years ago
Hi Mitchell, it's really great to have you explain all of these things here. Thank you both for this and for writing Vagrant, there is no doubt that it is a valuable piece of software. I have a few more questions if you don't mind:
1. When you first started with Vagrant, did you consider using Python at all? Did you consider using libvirt? Because VirtualBox offers a Python API out of the box (or it does now) and libvirt comes with direct support for Python (http://libvirt.org/bindings.html). I like Ruby and generally I prefer it to Python but I am interested in your view of whether it was the right tool for the job in this case or whether the language choice didn't matter much.
2. In your view what is the overlap in functionality between libvirt and Vagrant and what are the differences? As far as I can see libvirt does let you spin up boxes, talk to them and tear them down. The notable difference is that there is no Puppet of Chef provisioning, is there anything else beyond that?
3. veewee in version 0.3.0 (currently in beta) seems to offer the same functionality as Vagrant plus the ability to create boxes using templates, minus the ability to run provisioners. If they add that say in 0.4.0 then it will be 1:1 in terms of features with Vagrant. Any thoughts on this?
Thank you again for your time and for answering in such detail :-)
Comment · 14 years ago
I wasn't aware of this. Have you seen anything that supports it?
Comment · 14 years ago
Yes, the project seems to have around 380 files. I'd be interested to hear from the author if he's reading this thread why the codebase is at this size. Perhaps VirtualBox quirks necessitate a large part of it?
Comment · 14 years ago
I'm not sure what are the benefits of supporting many VM providers for a tool that is meant for development (as far as I understand at least). Isn't VirtualBox sufficient? It is open source and runs on Linux, OS X and MS Windows. Perhaps I am missing some core idea.
Then there is veewee[1] which started life as a Vagrant plugin but as of version 0.3.0 it can be used standalone and one can ssh to the boxes using it, just like with Vagrant. If they were to add provisioning it would probably be an alternative to Vagrant feature for feature so maybe we're seeing a bit of competition between these two tools there.
On Ubuntu there is VMBuilder[2] written in Python but it doesn't offer provisioning as far as I know.
Last, as others have mentioned there is libvirt[3] which offers tools for communicating with different VMs but I don't think it offers a tool that matches what Vagrant does 1:1 (most notably the provisioning part).
1. https://github.com/jedi4ever/veewee/blob/master/doc/README-c...
1. https://github.com/automaticmode/active_workflow 2. https://github.com/automaticmode/active_workflow/blob/master...