Should we disable limactl start NEWINSTANCE in Lima 2?

[jandubois]

It happened to me before, and I've just helped somebody else who ran

limactl start -y k3s

And then was surprised that they created an instance of template://default and not template://k3s.

We can still allow limactl start --name k3s to create and start a differently named default instance, but at least the user has to explicitly specify that they mean a NAME and not a TEMPLATE.

To be explicit, limactl start would still create and start the default instance, but limactl start k3s would throw an error if the k3s instance didn't exist yet.

This is a rare opportunity to get rid of a mis-feature that only exists because of backwards compatibility.

Starting with a discussion to see if there is consensus before turning it into an issue.

[jandubois]

Followup question: What does this mean for limactl create? I would recommend that you would also need to specify --name to create another default instance. These should all work (assuming there is no instance of this name yet):

limactl create
limactl create --name mine
limactl create template://k3s

But the ambiguous version could show a prompt (when running on a TTY):

$ limactl create k3s
What did you want to create:
> An instance of template://main
  An instance of template://k3s

When running without a TTY it should exit with an error.

Maybe the prompt should be used for limactl start k3s too?

---

Maybe the prompt could be skipped when template://foo does not exist. But I think it is bad if CLI options are treated differently depending on the local machine setup/configuration.

So maybe always requiring to use --name when the instance does not yet exist is best.

[AkihiroSuda]

SGTM

show a prompt

Sounds overengineering, but no objection