UUID breaks data abstraction

[Warren MacEvoy]

Don't you hate how excel can't open two spreadsheets just because they have the same name? Excel breaks the file abstraction of its data which makes it hard to use.

VBox does the same thing, only more so because of the UUID of all resources (in Excel, only the name breaks the abstraction, and that is painful enough, in VBox, every component breaks the abstraction via UUID, so changing the name does not help).

So it is not possible to treat even a shutdown virtualbox as a "file", something that can be backed up and duplicated shared, modified and improved and reused without special tools to import (recode it, so it is not the thing you backed up or shared or can share back without the same problem).

Please reconsider the dependence of UUIDs in your resource model.

[socratis]

So it is not possible to treat even a shutdown virtualbox as a "file", ...

I'm not following that part, could you elaborate?

[klaus]

It's simply a bad habit to treat VMs as a mere collection of files. Things need to fit together, and this is achieved using UUIDs.

That said - it's long on our wishlist to allow adding a VM which is a "file copy" of another one on the same system. It's work.