[Neurodebian-devel] Creating Neurodebian image with Veewee

[Emmanuel Kasper]

(continuing the thread from
http://lists.alioth.debian.org/pipermail/neurodebian-users/2013-July/000673.html
) here


>> I have been experimenting with Veewee for that purpose (I documented the
> steps here[1]) but I am moderately happy with the tool, so I am looking
>> for alternatives.

>veewee indeed sounds really nice and I did try using it at some point as
>well.  My hurdle was is that it is Ruby-based and not packaged
>(yet [2]) for Debian while having relatively heavy list of >dependencies,
>and integration with vagrant requires a custom build IIRC.

>Despite all those shortcomings I think that some time in the
>future we might migrate to it since it does look like a solid,
>maintained, and expandable happen we need more backends (e.g. >lxc-docker
[3]).

* Veewee is very much a moving target, like many ruby projects. Official
documentation recommends to use the code from github, not the releases,
and the Wiki documentation use veewee commands *not* available ine the
released  version (as of July 2013)
* There are still 5 missing ruby gems to be packaged for Veevee
* Veewee uses the vagrant gem to provide Vagrant boxes. However Vagrant
itselft is not avaible as gem anymore so I don't know how this will
break in the future.
* the default templates for creating debian images are far away from a
vanilla debian install ( it bypasses debian packages for several
components: virtual box additions, ruby, chef, puppet ...)

Ideally I would have prefered provisionning with libvirt, but
unfortunately it only really works with the kvm backend.
(see https://gist.github.com/EmmanuelKasper/5861319 for a one liner for
Debian 7), so in the end Veewee remains the only general purpose tool to
create VirtualBox VMs.

So after evaluating options, I will still try to create a "Good" Veewee
template for creating Debian 7 and unstable images, and when that works,
maybe we could test it with creating a Neurodebian image.

My own interest here is to have "official" debian images for Vagrant and
Virtualbox, we have here an overlap of intereset :)

Manu

NB: Please CC me as I am not on the list.