When you start a project, that is as complex as nuvolaris (a new distribution of a Apache OpenWhisk), you need to be very careful in what you do, as your initial choices will be the hardest to change later.
Whatever you choose now, it will be shared by a number of people, they will learn your procedures, and they won't be happy if you change them. Also, even if you decide later to update them, your changes will disrupt the workflows and create friction in the team.
I am working hard, but for now is's a solo effort to prepare the development environment. And here I am evolving my decisions on how to develop Nuvolaris.
First I simply wrote a readme, mentioning the required components. But since there are so many, so I wrote a script setup.source using also the various nodenv pyenv and goenv to set the correct version of the programming languages to use.
Then I decided that was also wise to provide a stable environment to run everything, so I considered the option of using a virtual machine to run everything in the same way for everyone. So I spent some time tweaking with multipass to see if I could use this as a standard environment for development, as I mostly develop using VSCode with the Remote-SSH plugin and I use my server.
In the end my conclusion is that setting up multipass is complex enough to not be worth the effort. But I considered to use VSCode Remote-Container plugin, and it was a great find. I was aware of this but I haven't actually used it in the past, but it is great, as there are provisions to initialize the environments for the various programming languages!
A perfect fit for my needs. So I decided to use Remote-Containers instead and built a Dockerfile to create the perfect development environment for Nuvolaris with all the development tools inside. So you can develop on Linux, Mac or Windows, and even on the web using CodeSpaces!
My only regret was that I actually use a Mac with ARM M1. It is not a problem, as I do not develop in it. As I said, I use a remote, Intel based, server with VSCode Remote-SSH. I personally can't use the Remote-Container simply because the image I built is intel based (and please, do not talk of emulating Intel in Docker for ARM as it is considerably slower).
Then I wondered: why not support ALSO ARM? Actually, we would like to support Nuvolaris on multiple Kubernetes distributions, and yesterday we discussed of building clusters of Kubernetes with Raspberry PIs and it would be awesome to have Nuvolaris running on those!
So I decided to go with this option too, and I decided to support ALSO arm64 from day one. In the end we are going to build Nuvolaris to work on a variety of Kubernetes environments, both on Intel and ARM architectures. And I am now building the development environment to be multi-architecture so you can work on a Windows PC, on a Mac with M1 chips and even on a Raspberry PI, as long as you have Docker.
Stay tuned.
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