• Bug#1049999: vagrant: the future of packaging vagrant in Debian

    From Lucas Nussbaum@21:1/5 to Lucas Nussbaum on Fri Apr 18 09:50:02 2025
    Control: severity 1049999 serious

    Hi,

    On 27/05/24 at 22:24 +0200, Lucas Nussbaum wrote:
    Hi,

    An update on this:

    I plan to take care of the Debian vagrant package (in the framework of
    the Ruby team, as this is currently done). I uploaded the latest free
    version of Vagrant to unstable/testing
    (2.3.7+git20230731.5fc64cde+dfsg-2).

    Of course help is welcomed. An easy and useful entry point is to look at existing bugs, try to reproduce them with the latest version, and report back.


    I do not plan to package the non-free versions of Vagrant.


    I also plan to continue to take care of the Debian Vagrant images,
    including ensure that they work with the version of Vagrant in Debian.


    I also looked a bit at potential alternatives. A project with a good potential is Incus (a LXD fork by the original LXC/LXD main developer).
    It is easy to install, and it provides both VMs and containers support.

    However currently it does not provide an equivalent to a Vagrantfile (to describe the infrastructure to create, what to execute on nodes, etc.). There's a terraform/opentofu provider, but that doesn't sounds very
    exciting regarding complexity. I raised that topic in https://discuss.linuxcontainers.org/t/incus-as-a-vagrant-replacement/19586 but the discussion did not go anywhere interesting.

    Maybe a third party project could create an incus frontend that provides
    a Vagrantfile-like interface. Given infinite free time, I would likely
    work on that. :)

    Another update on this:

    I worked on an Vagrant-inspired Incus-frontend, called Incant: https://github.com/lnussbaum/incant/

    Incant is probably too new to ship it in Debian trixie, but I think that
    it can reasonably meet use cases where Vagrant was useful. If feedback
    is positive, I will package it in Debian and plan to provide it through backports.

    But that also means that I've lost interest in maintaining or using
    Vagrant in Debian.
    Also, the HCP episode in January (see #1092987), where downloading boxes
    was broken for free versions of Vagrant for several weeks, shows that we
    should not expect HashiCorp to be extremely helpful with maintaining
    free versions of Vagrant.

    I therefore think that it's better not to ship Vagrant as part of
    trixie, and am raising the severity of this bug to 'serious'.

    If someone commits to maintaining it, feel free to dowgrade the severity
    again.

    Lucas

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