[katello-devel] katello-dev-box proposal

[Dmitri Dolguikh]

On 16/08/12 09:38 AM, Ivan Nečas wrote:
> Hi,
>
> Interesting news yesterday: Rails team published a "rails-dev-box", 
> which basically provides you a way how to get a VM and turn it into 
> development environment for Rails so that you can start contributing 
> to it really quickly. For me, there is a message behind this: rvm, 
> rbenv or bundler are not the ultimate tools for Ruby development and 
> if it's not just a simple library without dependencies, you need 
> something more. And this is case for Katello as well.
>
> I don't see a reason why this couldn't be the preferred way to get an 
> environment ready for Katello development. We already have the setup 
> automated enough, we just need to talk about it more loudly.
>
> What would we do:
>
> 1. create a Vagrant image to have Fedora/CentOS with preinstalled 
> Katello dependencies from RPMs + yum update from nightly builds to 
> always have the latest/greatest
> 2. tune our puppet modules to run on that after first start + make 
> custom development config to use git source repo
> 3. publish it, blog about it
> 4. party :)
>
> What it brings:
>
> 1. one OS agnostic command to have everything up and running for 
> development
> 2. don't pollute you host OS with Katello dependencies, make it easier 
> to start over again, if something goes wrong
> 3. provide the supported stack for development
> 4. using our katello-configure Puppet modules in development = 
> continuous improvement for the Puppet modules
>
> But what if I want to use the tools (editor, IDE) from my host machine?
>
> - you can set up sshfs to the virtual machine
>
> But what if I desperately want to run Rails server on my host machine
>
> - nobody can stop you, the Gemfile lock is already there, with the 
> versions that are used in the supported stack, you need to do some 
> additional steps, but nothing is for free
> - you still have all the other dependencies encapsulated in the VM
>
> But Ruby developers are used just to run `bundle install` and go:
>
> - no, Ruby developers are used to get up and running quickly
> - there is no way pure bundler will ever help you to get Katello for 
> development up and running. Period.
> - having just Ruby dependencies isn't enough for development: green 
> unit tests don't mean your code really works, it's just a hint you are 
> on a good way
>
No, it means you have problems with your tests and/or code coverage.
-d

> What do you think? I'm using this approach for my devel setup and it 
> makes the world much better place.
>