VMbuilder delay

I said I expected to have a working 'beta' of vmbuilder that could make AMIs of Debian by Friday. Well I don't think I can get it to you in time, because of the way that vmbuilder works. You see, the core VMbuilder has a nice system to support future distros sanely. So I could easily extend it to create VMs for pretty much anything that uses the Linux kernel.

But... EC2 has very specific pre-install/post-install actions that are hard-coded to three different Ubuntu distributions. So I need to talk to the EC2 plugin guys about how to refactor the thing to allow the distro plugin to offer specific EC2 actions. I _could_ just add preinstall/install_etch/lenny functions, but that would be a copout. I suspect this is the reason why the EC2 plugin isn't in VMbuilder trunk.

And as a final kink, it uses ec2-tools to bundle and upload the image, and a python library called Boto to register it in the VM deploy code. So I need to get patches in Boto - or find someone who's trying to get patches in it - to allow it to connect to Eucalyptus.

On the other hand, I found someone who's already written Debian plugins that work with regular (non-EC2/Euca) VMs. It only supports Etch, but Lenny shouldn't be that different from Etch.

So let's just say when I said Friday on the SOC coordination mailing list, it was in Valve Time.