Packer is a tool for creating identical machine images for multiple platforms

Re:Packer is a tool for creating identical machine images fo... by nwjsmith on Friday June 28, 2013 @04:44PM (#5960256)

I doubt this is why Go was chosen over Ruby, it would be fast enough for this problem. It probably has more to do with distributing the software.

Distributing programs in written in Go is _much_ easier that distributing them in Ruby, i.e. cross compile and ship the binary, but distribution of Ruby programs is hard.

Too much time is wasted on 'omnibus' projects to distribute Ruby programs, just look at Chef or Sensu or Mitchell's own Vagrant installers project:

https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant-installers

(I don't mean to say those projects were a waste of time, but that it seems like this should be a 'solved' problem).

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Re:Packer is a tool for creating identical machine images fo... by timmow on Saturday June 29, 2013 @09:53AM (#5962380)

This seems to me to be an issue that there is some disagreement on between devs and ops people - most devs are happy to distribute software with a Gemfile and see it as a solved problem. Ops packages tend to go the omnibus route like Chef has, or use Jruby and package as a Jar file like http://logstash.net/

I wonder if there is anything developers can do as a community to help solve the problems these distributors feel they have?

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Re:Packer is a tool for creating identical machine images fo... by mitchellh on Friday June 28, 2013 @07:33PM (#5960889)

Ding ding.

There are other reasons but this was a _big_ one.

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