merge bento and packer-windows

[athingisathing]

I merged in this project with in with yours localy and it worked great!

i can do the merge but i thought if one of the owners of bento reach out you could combine efforts and have one project!

https://github.com/joefitzgerald/packer-windows

[misheska]

FYI: There are also some Windows templates here in the box-cutter project that are worth considering as well: https://github.com/box-cutter/windows-vm

I'm not sure what the plan for incorporating newer Packer-based templates in bento is, but we are actively working on modern Windows templates over in the box-cutter project. This might be a better avenue for getting your changes in.

Box-cutter https://github.com/box-cutter - is a relatively new project sponsored by Chef to encourage collaboration and incubate new community templates for virtual machines, cloud, metal and containers. It does not replace bento, but think of box-cutter as the "Fedora" to bento - a place to try new ideas around templates - and bento is our tried and true "stable" places for Vagrant templates.

It's been pretty clear within Chef that there is a need for two complementary projects like this, as Chef is extremely reliant on having a solid, stable set of templates to support Chef release builds. But it is also clear that there needs to be a place to experiment with some new ideas.

Within box-cutter, we've been working on Windows templates for some time, and have been sharing techniques back and forth with Joe Fitzgerald and the people maintaining his templates. (Box-cutter is just trying to experiment with better ways of logging within packer, and ways to perform Windows patch management that require a slightly different approach. We're also experimenting with radically changing the way Packer works with Windows to generate WIM images, which looks like it might be a better approach than the current system. Please join in the fun, if you like).

[juliandunn]

@athingisathing Once Packer has native WinRM support (@sneal is working on this) then we will add templates here. But @misheska is right - this project is unlikely to contain all flavors and permutations of operating systems. It's mostly for producing boxes that we (Chef Software, Inc.) consume as part of our testing, and make available as the default boxes used by Test Kitchen. I invite you to contribute to his Box Cutter project.