launchpad-dev team mailing list archive

[Martin Pool <mbp@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

On 24 May 2010 13:56, Karl Fogel <karl.fogel@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> I've heard (second hand) that some developers have found it very useful
> to do their Launchpad development in VMs.  Then you can hose your
> Postgres DBs with impunity, not worry about running rocketfuel-setup as
> root, not worry about modifying /etc/hosts, etc.

Robert did this.

> Does anyone here have experience doing Launchpad development in a VM?
> And if so, would you like to document it in the wiki, probably linked to
> from https://dev.launchpad.net/Running?  Even just a brief mention of
> what VM package you used, along with any special configuration, would
> help -- at least it would remind people that this route is available.

What a great idea.

> (Note we already have https://dev.launchpad.net/Running/Schroot linked
> from Running, offering similar benefits.  But IIUC going the full VM
> route is somewhat different from just running in a chroot jail.)

Some points of difference:

 * schroot lets you directly access branches under /home, so you can
eg run your editor outside of the chroot and they can directly talk to
your ssh agent.
 * VMs can be put to sleep and reawakened.  otoh it's pretty easy to
start the services you need and then run launchpad in a chroot.
 * VMs have their own IP address (normally) so won't fight so much
with other services running on the same machine
 * VMs are arguably more strongly isolated for security, but I don't
think that really matters here.
 * VMs possibly use more disk space by creating a full virtual disk
 * I like the way you can pseudo-directly run a command under schroot
(see the page); presumably with a VM you can just SSH into it.

-- 
Martin <http://launchpad.net/~mbp/>