On 07/12/16 at 20:27 +0000, Niels Thykier wrote: > Lucas Nussbaum: > > Hi, > > > > On 28/11/16 at 12:04 +0000, Ian Jackson wrote: > >> [...] > > > > No. > > > > I think that we should rather push for using tools such as Vagrant or > > Docker to provide a way to easily create development environments for > > services. > > > > [...] > > > > Lucas > > > > So I happily agree that those are useful tools in general. And having a > local copy, which you have full control over certainly have a lot of > extra merits! > > But what did you envision for non-daemon services? AFAICT, neither > Vagrant nor docker is particularly suited for the particular services I > am involved it. Personally, I would prefer if we could (loosely) agree > on where we are headed here, so we don't end up with 3+ different ways > of making our services "dev-accessible".
I'm not sure I see a big difference for non-daemon services. What you usually care about is the ability to run stuff in an environment that is very similar or identical to the production environment (Debian version, dependencies, paths, ...) in order to increase the confidence that the code you are working on is correct. And Vagrant makes this easy to achieve. Whether the service runs as a daemon, or is run via cron (in production) or manually (in the dev environment) does not make much of a difference[0]. Of course, what you would need for both britney and lintian is a way to provide some test input data in the development environment (and probably different kinds of input data depending on what you want to work on). Lucas [0] for services that currently run via cron, it would be interesting to transition to running them using systemd service + timer, so that it's easy to run the service manually in the same environment when run manually (systemctl start foo.service). I don't know if it's possible to do that, and still use journal for logging, with a systemd user instance.