[CentOS-devel] Providing checksums for our Vagrant images

[Laurentiu Pancescu]

On 23/03/17 09:32, Michael Vermaes wrote:
> I think there is still some benefit to maintaining a presence on Atlas
> if possible, as it is where Vagrant users are likely to search for
> CentOS boxes first. But hosting the metadata on the CentOS
> infrastructure makes a lot of sense for the reasons you mentioned. I
> guess you could maybe leave a final release in Atlas pointing people
> to the new location when it's available.

It would be great if Atlas would also allow redirects for metadata, not 
just the boxes - not sure if that's possible.  I'm also not sure how 
many users search directly on Atlas for official images released by 
CentOS, instead of Google or our own website.  If we decide to move away 
from Atlas, we should definitely release a last image there, with the 
description pointing people to the new location (ideally, a web page 
dedicated to our Vagrant images).

> By the way, from what I can understand from the commit history [1], it
> looks like the Bento metadata was added for a similar reason, to allow
> them to consider standing up their own metadata server in place of
> Atlas.
>
> [1] https://github.com/chef/bento/pull/387

Thanks, I didn't know that.  But I realized another benefit to hosting 
our own metadata, besides checksums: we could also get statistics on how 
many active users we have, on which host OSes, since Vagrant will 
download the metadata to check if a new image has been released (at 
least when a box is booted).

Laurențiu