need to specify box versions

[aspiers]

A given revision of this repository can only be guaranteed to work with versions of boxes which it has been tested with. For example Vagrantfile patches the admin node, but a newer box may already have the same patch applied. Or in the case of d296e01, the Vagrantfile reverted a commit which was present in newer boxes but not in the older boxes which https://vagrantcloud.com/suse/ points to at the time of writing.

So success depends to some extent on whether the boxes are obtained from https://vagrantcloud.com/suse/ or from internal builds. The correct solution to this is probably a combination of specifying version contraints in the Vagrantfile where appropriate, and using a new git branch to track which commits in this repo have been tested with the boxes pointed to by https://vagrantcloud.com/suse/.

[aspiers]

So it's clear we need at least two branches:

• a branch to track what works with the latest boxes in Vagrant Cloud
• a branch to track latest development changes, tested against boxes built in IBS

Since the goal of this repo is to work for anyone external to SUSE, the branch which gets checked out by default should be the Vagrant Cloud one, which will usually lag behind the IBS branch. So either we call this master, and then have a next or IBS branch for newer changes, or we change the default github branch to be vagrantcloud, and then use master (or next or IBS) for newer changes. However unfortunately changing the default github branch for the repo also affects

• which branch users see by default when they visit https://github.com/SUSE-Cloud/suse-cloud-vagrant, and
• which branch pull requests are sent to by default.

This runs the risk of users spotting an issue in the older branch and not noticing that it has already been fixed in the newer branch. I guess a CONTRIBUTING.md would go some way towards solving this. @vuntz what approach do you think is best here?

[aspiers]

@vuntz don't forget to include this in your review work ;-)

[aspiers]

Boxes are now being built for Cloud 5, so we need to think how to do branching for multiple cloud releases.

[vuntz]

IMHO, master should be what's going to be used without IBS access -- because that's what you get by default when you do a git clone. If it makes life harder for developers, then so be it; the whole goal of this is to make life easier for people who want to play with SUSE Cloud.

[aspiers]

because that's what you get by default when you do a git clone

No it isn't ;-) You currently get the vagrantcloud branch.

If it makes life harder for developers, then so be it; the whole goal of this is to make life easier for people who want to play with SUSE Cloud.

Totally agree. But don't forget we can use github's feature for changing the default branch.

[aspiers]

Vagrant Cloud has been moved into Atlas, so we should rename accordingly. So I think these are the options:

Stable, public, default branch for use with Atlas boxes	Development branch for use with unpublished IBS boxes
master	next
master	IBS
atlas	master
atlas	next
atlas	IBS

I think I prefer the stable branch to be atlas because it's more explicit. Then maybe we should stick with master for the development branch simply because that's the convention in the git world. Having said that, this doesn't take into account Cloud 4/5/6 etc., nor the non-Vagrant appliance branches, so this needs more thought.

[aspiers]

I've thought about this (quite a lot) more. At first I was thinking that every release branch would need a corresponding branch for the appliance version, but I since realised that is ugly and causes quite a lot of replication violating DRY. Instead we can avoid it by having separate overlay hierarchies for Vagrant-specific and appliance-specific files, which the corresponding BS projects download via tar_scm in addition to the base appliance filesystem, and the corresponding .kiwi file then layers over the base.

[aspiers]

Status update: I made some progress on this at SUSEcon, by writing a script to auto-import much of @vuntz hand-crafted hacks from OBS back into git. However the cloud7 and master branches are currently wildly diverged, and cloud6 is missing altogether, so still some work to go.

[aspiers]

Apparently @vuntz reconverged the vagrant and appliance versions, so apparently we no longer need separate versions for each. Things like how many interfaces to configure get dynamically determined:

https://github.com/SUSE-Cloud/suse-cloud-vagrant/pull/23/files#diff-be0c3133de660546bca8bf3af5dd4274R90