Bug#399840: Do we want an ssh-server task?

[Matthew Palmer <mpalmer@debian.org>]

On Sun, Aug 09, 2009 at 03:31:10PM +0200, Frans Pop wrote:
> On Sunday 09 August 2009, Colin Watson wrote:
> > On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 01:14:52PM +0200, Frans Pop wrote:
> > > On Wednesday 29 July 2009, Christian Perrier wrote:
> > > > An interesting proposal that Colin made was to converge towards a
> > > > task named "Login server" or something similar, that would include
> > > > openssh-server, along with other packages such as denyhosts (or
> > > > sshguard), rssh (Restricted shell allowing scp, sftp, cvs, svn,
> > > > rsync or rdist), molly-guard (protects machines from accidental
> > > > shutdowns/reboots)...
> > >
> > > Most systems really only want ssh, not any of the rest.
> >
> > Is this assertion really true? My experience has been that quite a lot
> > of people actually want something a bit more, even if they don't know
> > it.
> 
> I've personally never installed any of the others on any of my systems, 
> while I do have openssh-server installed on all of my systems.
> 
> The actual request is to make it easier to have openssh-server installed 
> so that users can straight away access the newly installed system over 
> ssh, nothing more and nothing less. So IMO we need a task that does 
> exactly that, and nothing more.

Out of curiosity, how are people in this situation actually installing their
systems? Are there really that many people out there that are keyboarding
their way through an entire install, but can't (won't?) then login to the
newly installed system at the console and run "apt-get install
openssh-server"?

As someone who has preseeded their installs to the point where a new,
fully-configured machine is nothing more than a 10 minute appointment with
the PXE server, I'm having trouble imagining that there's a large market for
this microtask[1], but I've been wrong before.  I just think it's a question
worth asking.

- Matt

[1] I think a better name for this might be "package", but I'll stick with
"microtask" until there is wider acceptance of this new term.  <grin>