Bug#1110834: cloud.debian.org: Please add Vagrant boxes for debian/trixie64 (Debian 13)
Hi,
On 11/08/25 at 14:56 +0200, Chris Hofstaedtler wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 11, 2025 at 11:04:37AM +0100, Andrew Chadwick wrote:
> > I noticed that there are no Trixie boxes listed at
> >
> > https://portal.cloud.hashicorp.com/vagrant/discover/debian
> > https://app.vagrantup.com/debian (its cooler alias, for now I guess)
> >
> > Now that Trixie is out, please can a Vagrant box be added for it? I'm an
> > amd64+libvirt kind of guy myself, but I realise there are more types of box
> > to pack than just this, and it's a ton of work. Thanks in advance.
>
> I don't have the reference to it at hand, but it was announced that
> due to the license change of Vagrant all previous contributors lost
> interest.
>
> Thus I'd suggest not expecting any further updates to these images.
I was doing the work required to update Debian images for Vagrant, and
was also involved in the maintenance of the Vagrant package.
The current situation is:
1/ The Vagrant software is now non-free. There's still a package in
Debian (trixie), with the latest free version. There are been discussion
in https://bugs.debian.org/1049999 and in the thread starting with
https://lists.debian.org/debian-release/2025/06/msg00484.html about the
future of this package. Hans-Christoph Steiner is maintaining it at the
moment (even if this doesn't reflect in the Uploaders field of the
package in trixie).
2/ The Vagrant images moved from VagrantCloud to HashiCorp Cloud
Platform. Since then, I frequently ran into issues when uploading new
images, and it's not clear if HashiCorp is going to continue to support
old Vagrant versions with HCP. After contacting HCP's support
about one of those issues (see
https://github.com/hashicorp/vagrant/issues/13571, reported January
10th, fixed March 5th), HashiCorp support replied "you need to update
the Vagrant version if you want to use HCP Vagrant boxes.". It's not
clear if this is an official HashiCorp statement (someone else said they
want to maintain backward compatibility with older versions in the
github issue), but I would not bet on being able to use HCP images
with the free Vagrant version for too long. There was more discussion in
https://bugs.debian.org/1104105.
As a result, I decided to stop maintaining Debian images for Vagrant.
Your options are:
A/ use the latest debian/testing64 image, which was updated on
2025-04-26, so it might be sufficiently close to what Debian trixie
looks like.
B/ find a new maintainer for the Debian images. If someone wants to take
over, the tooling at
https://salsa.debian.org/cloud-team/debian-vagrant-images/ still works
(except maybe for the upload part) and I can walk you through it if
needed.
C/ switch to something else. Personnally, I switched to Incus and since
I missed a declarative way to describe my environments, I wrote Incant,
a Vagrant-inspired frontend that brings that to Incus (see
https://github.com/lnussbaum/incant/). It's still rough around the
edges but has met my needs, and I heard positive feedback from others.
And I have a few pending changes are MRs to look at, so it will likely
improve soon. Also Incus has an image for Debian trixie uploaded on a
regular basis (daily I think) and usually also has an image for Debian
testing.
Lucas
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