> Running a whole VM just to run an app is immensely irritating.
Although starting a VM to run an app is irritating, spending time hunting down why your build is breaking (or worse, why production is breaking) because someone had a library a few minor versions out of sync or because they're on a different operating system is immensely more irritating.
It probably depends on what you're doing, but I've found Vagrant extremely valuable for doing sysadmin work. I do a lot of work with Chef for various clients, and Vagrant makes it trivial to test. From a clean Ubuntu or CentOS VM to a running system in a few minutes. I could see a lot of benefit to using this for application development and testing as well.
This was the original reason that Mitchell and I started the project. We were Rails consultants at the time who just got sick of juggling application environments.
> Unnecessary statefulness for what should be a script
Can you clarify your meaning here? I fail to see how sequestering n random server components inside a vm, or vms, is more statefull than doing the same on your workstation.
[edit] I upvoted your response, because I appreciate your other points
Comments
I don't know Github's reasons, but I can tell you mine!
Unnecessary statefulness for what should be a script sucks.
Running a whole VM just to run an app is immensely irritating.
Also, Vagrant breaks in the same ways the usual bundler mess breaks as well.
> Running a whole VM just to run an app is immensely irritating.
Although starting a VM to run an app is irritating, spending time hunting down why your build is breaking (or worse, why production is breaking) because someone had a library a few minor versions out of sync or because they're on a different operating system is immensely more irritating.
I'm not sure what your opposition is.
It probably depends on what you're doing, but I've found Vagrant extremely valuable for doing sysadmin work. I do a lot of work with Chef for various clients, and Vagrant makes it trivial to test. From a clean Ubuntu or CentOS VM to a running system in a few minutes. I could see a lot of benefit to using this for application development and testing as well.
This was the original reason that Mitchell and I started the project. We were Rails consultants at the time who just got sick of juggling application environments.
> Unnecessary statefulness for what should be a script
Can you clarify your meaning here? I fail to see how sequestering n random server components inside a vm, or vms, is more statefull than doing the same on your workstation.
[edit] I upvoted your response, because I appreciate your other points