[lxc-devel] RFC: aliases

[Serge Hallyn]

Quoting Jay Taylor (jay at jaytaylor.com):
> Hey Serge,
> 
> 
> On Tue, Aug 20, 2013 at 1:55 PM, Serge Hallyn <serge.hallyn at ubuntu.com>wrote:
> 
> > Hi,
> >
> > one idea that has been brought up is to support 'aliases'.  So if you're
> > locally building a daily pristine container, say at 'c-2013-08-20',
> > you might want to then have a 'c-latest' alias or link pointing to the
> > latest container, so you can always just
> >
> >         sudo lxc-clone -o c-latest -n test1 -s
> >
> > The most obvious idea would be to use a symbolic link.  However, while
> > that mostly works, it's actually not perfect - lxc_container_new()
> > will be called with the name you passed in (c-latest), not with the
> > symlinked name.
> >
> > Another idea would be to support a $lxcpath/$lxcname/config consisting
> > of only 'lxc.alias = c-2013-0820'.
> >
> > Do people have any other ideas?
> 
> 
> > I'm thinking symbolic link may be the simplest thing to support -
> > lxc_container_new() could immediately readlink() to get the real
> > container name.
> >
> 
> I like the idea of using a symlink - it'd make it simple and intuitive to
> understand what's going on.
> 
> What would happen when you run lxc-destroy on an alias?  Will it destroy
> the symlink or the container being pointed to?

Good question :)  The easier thing would be to make it destroy what is
being pointed to.  But I'm not sure right now - is that behavior weird,
or useful?