Bugzilla

This is a good reminder I haven't posted the (limited) notes from the Searchfox sessions at the all-hands, apologies.

I'd discussed this with Subhamoy at/around one of the sessions in the context of difficulties both others and I had had in terms of getting vagrant running on OS X and on an Ubuntu box that I moved from virtualbox to libvirt.  Things improved a lot with https://github.com/mozsearch/mozsearch/commit/cc3c4b3fcf223cb6191857fa9e95c6e51dc2aa4e#diff-23b6f443c01ea2efcb4f36eedfea9089 and https://github.com/mozsearch/mozsearch/commit/a94cba4125fab4443feda2b404e94feddb2da2ce#diff-23b6f443c01ea2efcb4f36eedfea9089 which fixed actual correctness problems with VirtualBox.

I'd characterize the problems as:
- VirtualBox has been historically flakey and unreliable for me on linux with short reads everywhere.  Honestly, I don't think it was that bad on OS X other than a very ill conceived attempt on my part to use homebrew.  Once I nuked homebrew things weren't that bad (after the Vagrantfile fixes).
- The libvirt situation is much improved, but I ran into real dependency/bit-rot problems on setting things up on Ubuntu 19.10 on my laptop.  I had followed the https://github.com/vagrant-libvirt/vagrant-libvirt#installation instructions on my desktop for 19.04 and that worked fine a upgraded to 19.10 fine.  But for a fresh install on 19.10 on my laptop, `vagrant plugin install vagrant-libvirt` ran into all kinds of ruby dependency mismatches.  I ended up just trying to install everything via apt and that worked and what is currently documented, but I think that's using the `libvirt` plugin which I believe is different from the `vagrant-libvirt` plugin, with the former I believe being unmaintained.

And for the general solution space, all we really want is an Ubuntu machine with our provisioning shell scripts run on it, so we're not particularly tied to any virtualization system, we just want to minimize the hassle for potential contributors.


I'm going to reopen this since I'm notionally mentoring this and I think it makes sense to have a tracker for such an investigation.  I absolutely agree that actually landing such a change or recommending use of docker depends on the set of changes seeming reasonable and maintainable.  I know Subhamoy ran into some troubles related to bazel and building livegrep, and that would be an example of a potential blocker if we no longer had the potential to fork livegrep as necessary.

This is a good reminder I haven't posted the (limited) notes from the Searchfox sessions at the all-hands, apologies.

I'd discussed this with Subhamoy at/around one of the sessions in the context of difficulties both others and I had had in terms of getting vagrant running on OS X and on an Ubuntu box that I moved from virtualbox to libvirt.  Things improved a lot with https://github.com/mozsearch/mozsearch/commit/cc3c4b3fcf223cb6191857fa9e95c6e51dc2aa4e#diff-23b6f443c01ea2efcb4f36eedfea9089 and https://github.com/mozsearch/mozsearch/commit/a94cba4125fab4443feda2b404e94feddb2da2ce#diff-23b6f443c01ea2efcb4f36eedfea9089 which fixed actual correctness problems with VirtualBox.

I'd characterize the problems as:
- VirtualBox has been historically flakey and unreliable for me on linux with short reads everywhere.  Honestly, I don't think it was that bad on OS X other than a very ill conceived attempt on my part to use homebrew.  Once I nuked homebrew things weren't that bad (after the Vagrantfile fixes).
- The libvirt situation is much improved, but I ran into real dependency/bit-rot problems on setting things up on Ubuntu 19.10 on my laptop.  I had followed the https://github.com/vagrant-libvirt/vagrant-libvirt#installation instructions on my desktop for 19.04 and that worked fine and upgraded to 19.10 fine.  But for a fresh install on 19.10 on my laptop, `vagrant plugin install vagrant-libvirt` ran into all kinds of ruby dependency mismatches.  I ended up just trying to install everything via apt and that worked and what is currently documented, but I think that's using the `libvirt` plugin which I believe is different from the `vagrant-libvirt` plugin, with the former I believe being unmaintained.

And for the general solution space, all we really want is an Ubuntu machine with our provisioning shell scripts run on it, so we're not particularly tied to any virtualization system, we just want to minimize the hassle for potential contributors.


I'm going to reopen this since I'm notionally mentoring this and I think it makes sense to have a tracker for such an investigation.  I absolutely agree that actually landing such a change or recommending use of docker depends on the set of changes seeming reasonable and maintainable.  I know Subhamoy ran into some troubles related to bazel and building livegrep, and that would be an example of a potential blocker if we no longer had the potential to fork livegrep as necessary.