On Tue, 2016-03-15 at 14:44 -0400, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
"The basic question with using Vagrant from a marketing perspective:
how are we
a better development environment for deployment on Linux if
developers are
working the same way they would on a different operating system."
I'd just like to chime in that exceeding the competition is ideal,
but let's be
careful not to lose ground by continuing to deliver an inferior
experience while
we decide what a perfect one is.
Right now, Vagrant gives Windows and Mac users an ability to continue
working in
an environment they're comfortable with while still being able to
deploy on
Linux. At least having this remain a highly-supported option means
one fewer
thing they have to learn in order to make the switch. So I guess what
I'm saying
is basically: don't fixate on having EVERY aspect of Workstation be a
"better"
experience. Wherever possible, let the day-to-day workflow remain the
same for
someone who is crossing over and then wow them with the ecosystem
around it.
Remember: no matter how good the new workflow is, if it is
*different* then
users will complain and fear it (or irrationally complain without
giving it a
chance). Sometimes a slightly more polished solution that still works
how people
are accustomed will go further than a brand new solution that people
are
unwilling to try.
Certainly having vagrant just work as well as possible is something
that we need to have available, though if someone is happily firing up
Ubuntu virtual machines from the OS X terminal, converting that person
to do exactly the same thing on Fedora Workstation seems neither all
that likely nor all that interesting.
(The fact that Vagrant boxes and some Vagrantfile options are tied to
the provider is problematical. Providing an integrated out-of-
the-box Fedora Vagrant experience relies on defaulting to the libvirt
provider, but people coming from Windows and OS X will be depending on
the virtualbox provider at least in shallow ways)
But what are the enhancements we could do to make using Vagrant in
Fedora slicker and better? Should boxes be explicitly vagrant-aware,
and present appropriate options for vagrant machines? Should we have
some terminal integration to open up a new tab with 'vagrant ssh' to
the vagrant machine running in the current working directory?
and if vagrant is being used "behind the scenes" to run testing
instances of atomic apps (say) then we should be thinking at that
higher level and how do we make *that* the good experience - the
vagrant machine itself isn't very interesting
- Owen