[CentOS-devel] How CentOS 7 Vagrant images are built

Sun May 17 19:46:03 UTC 2020
Laurențiu Păncescu <lpancescu at centosproject.org>

Hi Brian,

On 5/16/20 11:04 PM, Brian Stinson wrote:
> Sounds like we need to have a longer discussion about this. I'd like for 
> all of the images we push for 8 and later to cloud.centos.org to come 
> from the same buildsystem (even if individual kickstarts are maintained 
> by different people). Current status is that all images are built using 
> ImageFactory in koji.mbox.centos.org using kickstarts from 
> https://git.centos.org/centos/kickstarts

That sounds reasonable. Are the Vagrant kickstarts there synced or 
merged with what we have on GitHub? What about the issues and pull 
requests, would everything move to bugs.c.o.? It would make sense not to 
have two places where we develop and collaborate. We currently also have 
GitHub hooks that automatically build and test new images on each 
incoming pull requests, is there an equivalent on Pagure (or GitLab, 
there was some talk about migrating away from Pagure).

> There are a couple of reasons for this, but the major driver is that 
> these images are tracked as pungi compose artifacts, which makes it much 
> easier to automate the publishing process going forward.

I would prefer to have everything fully automated for the Vagrant 
images, from image building and testing, to uploading, signing and 
publishing on Vagrant Cloud. That way, we can simply schedule this on 
the last day of each month and have regular releases (or 28th of each 
month if it's easier with cron).

> I think we have some (yet unproposed) changes coming that will make it 
> easier for non-core folks to generate test artifacts like this using the 
> same system. Until then, I'm happy to merge and re-spin CentOS 8 images 
> on demand.

I can already build images locally using Packer and the same kickstarts, 
so I can see if a kickstart change introduces some issues in the 
generated images (this doesn't let me see if pykickstart with ignore 
something in my kickstart, like it happened with %addon in centos/7 for 
a long time).

The Vagrant images are quite mature, there are barely any kickstart 
changes going on. I guess 8.2 will be released relatively soon, perhaps 
we can build and publish centos/8 then for all hypervisors (we're 
already so far behind with the 8 images - or would people prefer 8.1 
images right now, and then 8.2 when released?).

Would it make sense to also offer Vagrant images for CentOS 8 Stream?

Best regards,
Laurențiu