arizvisa
commented
3 years ago Yea, I definitely don't use "chef" and set it to nocm by default. Actually, I'd like to default to nocm tbh...but since that's what the original maintainers have set, I don't think I'm allowed to change it.
My build-system that's based on this is doing the following using the default shutdown w/o issues, so in my testing this should 100% should work without the Makefile because I don't use it at all (it's garbage imo).
packer build -only 'vmware-iso' -var 'headless=false' -var-file 'build/boxcutter-vars.json' -var-file '/home/user/audit/nitro/lol/build.dir/boxcutter-eval-win10x86-enterprise-iso-vars.json' -var 'box_directory=/home/user/audit/nitro/lol/build.dir/boxcutter-' 'build/boxcutter-windows/eval-win10x86-enterprise.json'with boxcutter-vars.json being set to:
{
"cpus": "1",
"disk_size": "102400",
"memory": "4096",
"cm": "nocm",
"cm_version": "",
"update": "false"
}Nonetheless definitely let me know if you encounter any other inconsistency issues. I'm glad someone else is interested in helping maintain this! :)
dragon788
It appears that the iso_url, iso_checksum, and shutdown_command and several other things (CM variable) are overridden from the templates defaults by the Makefile, meaning there are possibly a lot of partially invalid templates that can't actually be built directly with
packer build --only virtualbox-iso eval-win10x64-enterprise.json.It is non-intuitive that a user can't just look at the json template, they also have to dive into the Makefile and figure out which environment variables correspond to options, if they even realize that they can do overrides with environment variables. The use of environment variables makes sense if you are always running in a CI pipeline where they can persist between runs and be logged as part of the build, but if you only build a box occasionally or are building something locally it is time lost looking up the differences from the actual json pretty much every time.
The json templates contains the iso_url and iso_checksum and some sane defaults for
headlessandupdate(but sadly notcmwhich is set tochefwhich is a great tool but fails to install sometimes) but the fact that theMakefileoverrides any changes a user might make to these core settings in the template json seems bad and has caught me out several times when trying to make changes.It appears the root of issue described in the subject here is that the version of the
shutdown_commandin the templates has a space in the/cshutdown comment, where as you can see below themakeexecuted version uses an override to swaps in an underscore to eliminate the space and removes the need for the quotes.While debugging this I also discovered much to my dismay that if not using
makethe default CM option coming from the template files ischefand due to some infrastructure quirks the omnitruck site throws a 500 error causing builds to fail hard unless explicitly setting-var 'cm=nocm'when callingpacker build.Assembled command from
make virtualbox/eval-win10x64-enterpriseMany templates have it using single quotes
A couple have escaped double quotes
Example of error I was getting