Hi Soren, this is fantastic news :) I'm quite optimistic that with the procedure changes you plan this great project will finally get the attention it deserves.
Do you have any specific ideas for the new architecture of vmbuilder? Maybe we could use a wiki page to explore and discuss such possible architectures in more detail. What I think to be very important is to kind of negotiate the build capabilities of the host operating system and the capabilities and requirements of the distribution plugins somehow at startup. vmbuilder needs to check which filesystems, bootmanagers and other tools the plugins require, which the host system can satisfy and which could be satisfied by installing what packages. As I noted when I stumbled over the grub2 bug it could also become necessary to repackage some certain tools for use with vmbuilder. I may err but as I understand grub2 you need to install different packages if you use bios, efi 32/64Bit etc. and you can only have installed one at a time because the maintainers only think about people who install a boot manager to use them on the machine they install it on but don't think about us VM builders. But negotiation and special vmbuilder tool packages also appear very interesting to me since apart from seeming necessary to allow conceptional clean building of Ubuntu VMs they could also open the door to create VM images of every operating system imaginable from within Ubuntu, at least as long as there are the right tools available to vmbuilder. I think I could aid the design of the new architecture by stress testing it against vmbuilder-gui (which is kind of experimental but works quite well in my opinion) to see if the new architecture is flexible enough to handle other use cases than cli, gracefully. It would also be a good idea to not forget about suitability for a web gui although we don't have one at the time. I'm a big fan of TDD, too. But I could also need some more experience with more complex testing scenarios. I think vmbuilder could be hard to unit test because tests are easiest to write when your code is loosely coupled and functional style at best while vmbuilder is all about side-effects (calling command-line programs). Nevertheless I believe that we could improve the code quality of vmbuilder considerably with some well written tests. Best regards, Andreas _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~vmbuilder Post to : [email protected] Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~vmbuilder More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
