vmbuilder team mailing list archive

[Andreas Heck <aheck@xxxxxx>]

Hi Iain,

> I love the idea of using "virtual-appliance" as a marker for vas.
> 
> I have a couple of questions about the seed files:
> 
>  * How would I launch multiple vas that use the different seed files?

I'm not sure if I got your question right.

You just install a new VM with karmic in VirtualBox for example. You
then add a package repository with appliance packages to
your /etc/apt/sources.list and install the Debian package of your VA
(e.g. mysql-dev-appliance). But you don't use apt-get or aptitude as you
would do with normal packages. Instead you use the command

sudo vainstall mysql-dev-package

This fetches the seedfile for mysql-dev-package, seeds the debconf
database with the user selections from the seedfile. AFTERWARD it calls
apt-get to install the package and its dependencies.

The seedfile allows us to reuse packages straight from the repositories
and get control of all the user questions they might ask and overwrite
them when necessary.

Of course it would be quite easy change vmbuilder so that it allows the
selection of a VA package when you say something like:

vmbuilder vbox ubuntu --appliance=mediawiki-appliance

This would create a mediawiki appliance if there was a package
mediawiki-appliance and vmbuilder supported creating appliances with
this approach.

Since there aren't any repositories with appliance packages right can
only create a local repository, build the two appliance packages from my
branch, put them into the repo, and put the seedfiles in the same
directory.

>  * How do I provide my own seed files to override the upstream files?

Thanks for the idea. I should just add a new option --seedfile or
something like that to vainstall so that you can specify your own
seedfile vainstall should use instead of the official version that is
delivered with the package.


Best regards,

Andreas