DESCRIPTION: Several places where the default behavior of vmbuilder could possibly be improved, relative to what seems to happen on 14.04 / 16.04:
I've found that I always end up wanting --addpkg acpid when running vmbuilder so that the host can send the guest a request to shut down cleanly; maybe include this package by default unless it is somehow explicitly deselected?
I have developed a habit of always using --addpkg linux-image-virtual because at one point I ran into problems when not using it; if it is still needed, it should probably be included by default.
I've ended up with VMs in a directory where I didn't intend to have them when not specifying the -d flag; perhaps it would be better if vmbuilder would refuse to run without a -d flag explicitly specifying the directory. (Trying to identify all of the options one needs the first time running vmbuilder can be overwhelming, leading to leaving some options out and then ending up with a suboptimal VM, and sometimes one doesn't want to start over and rebuild the VM with the correct options.)
It might also be desirable to make the --timezone option mandatory; I think the default behavior is to put the guest in GMT rather than having it inherit the host's timezone, which can be surprising, especially if the host's timezone had initially been autodetected by the installer.
HEADLINE: vmbuilder defaults
DESCRIPTION: Several places where the default behavior of vmbuilder could possibly be improved, relative to what seems to happen on 14.04 / 16.04:
I've found that I always end up wanting --addpkg acpid when running vmbuilder so that the host can send the guest a request to shut down cleanly; maybe include this package by default unless it is somehow explicitly deselected?
I have developed a habit of always using --addpkg linux-image-virtual because at one point I ran into problems when not using it; if it is still needed, it should probably be included by default.
I've ended up with VMs in a directory where I didn't intend to have them when not specifying the -d flag; perhaps it would be better if vmbuilder would refuse to run without a -d flag explicitly specifying the directory. (Trying to identify all of the options one needs the first time running vmbuilder can be overwhelming, leading to leaving some options out and then ending up with a suboptimal VM, and sometimes one doesn't want to start over and rebuild the VM with the correct options.)
It might also be desirable to make the --timezone option mandatory; I think the default behavior is to put the guest in GMT rather than having it inherit the host's timezone, which can be surprising, especially if the host's timezone had initially been autodetected by the installer.