[Container-tools] Subtlety with libvirt provider that is causing quite a bit of misinformation

[Dusty Mabe]

On 06/02/2016 10:34 AM, Lalatendu Mohanty wrote:
> On 06/02/2016 07:53 PM, Dusty Mabe wrote:
>> There is a small subtlety with the libvirt vagrant provider that many
>> people aren't aware of.
>>
>> On the first `vagrant up` the vagrant box will be uploaded to the
>> libvirt storage pool and then used as a backing device for the vm that
>> gets started. So now you have the vagrant box file (lives in the
>> .vagrant.d directory) as well as a file in the libvirt storage pool.
>>
>> The problem comes about when you remove/re-add a box to a machine.
>> When you remove the box, it removes the box from vagrant but it does
>> not remove the box from the libvirt storage pool. If you subsequently
>> re-add the box (a newer version this time) to vagrant and perform a
>> `vagrant up` then no box gets uploaded because there is already a
>> "backing image" in libvirt with that name.
>>
>> What this leads to is people thinking they have the latest version of
>> the CDK installed, but really using something that is old as dirt.
>>
>> One example of this was the developers post [1] that came out a week
>> ago. The author was using a CDK box from January and some of the
>> information he had in the post was old.
>>
>> Another example came to me from some of my contacts in consulting.
>>
>> Basically this is dangerous because some people can "test" things and
>> "verify" they are working and not realize they are using old stuff.
>>
>> We need to somehow resolve this in the vagrant-libvirt provider or
>> come up with some other, client side way of verifying things.
>>
>> Dusty
>>
>> [1] http://developers.redhat.com/blog/2016/05/27/use-vagrant-landrush-to-add-dns-features-to-your-openshift-cdk-machine/
> 
> Dusty,
> 
> Thanks for bringing it up.  There is a old issue in vagrant-libvirt 
> about this i.e. https://github.com/vagrant-libvirt/vagrant-libvirt/issues/85
> 
Thanks lala. I added a comment upstream. 

>   think we should add it to documentation for the immediate next release 
> so that users are aware about this.

Agreed. We should also probably throw some resources towards helping
to fix the problem. Would be good to get this fixed sooner than later.

Should I file a BZ for this issue? 

Dusty