One part of the automated VM construction project is that we'll need to have a VM to install in to. My original thought was that using VirtualBox's cli VBoxManage, DC could configure a VM with either a vanilla set of options statically or configure the VM using data supplied in a manifest. The issue I see is that there are a LOT of options that one can set for a VM. And providing support for all of them in a manifest is going to be unwieldy. Using a vanilla set of options could work, but then we have to decide what those settings are and do they provide what users (those creating the virtual appliances) will want.
The third option is to have DC take the name of a pre-configured VM from a manifest and use that to install in to. This would require the user running DC to create and configure a VM in VirtualBox before running DC and supplying the name (and possibly a few other bits of relevant information) in the manifest used to create the virtual appliance. This option allows us to not 're-invent the wheel' as it were in terms of configuring VMs but does require some manual setup on the part of the user before he can actually create his virtual appliance (instead of just modifying a manifest and running distro_const build). Thoughts? -- Glenn
