Re: own cloud task in tasksel?
Hi all,
> On Mar 08, Martin Zobel-Helas <zobel@debian.org> wrote:
>
> > with more and more cloud provider publishing images, and the Debian
> > project wanting to be able to rebuild those images, i wonder if it makes
> > sense to have an own cloud task, that installs basic packages that are
> > needed by cloud images, eg. SSH, cloud-init, ...
Le Tue, Mar 08, 2016 at 06:35:45PM +0100, Marco d'Itri a écrit :
>
> I believe that this would be confusing, considering the wildly
> different definitions of "cloud" and different requirements of hosters.
> (E.g. my employer's cloud infrastructure would make no use of cloud-init.)
This reminds me #696154 ("Please install 'less' by default on official Debian
AMIs."). Basically, there is a tension between:
- providing cloud images that are a strict minimum on which to build new
images, and
- providing cloud images on which it is comfortable to work interactively via
the command-line interface after booting them.
Maybe this problem can be solved by the use of metapackages ? With the
exclusion of cloud-init, specialised kernels etc., can we converge on a
metapackage that would represent the most frequent expectations of users of
non-minimal cloud images in Debian and elsewhere ?
Back to the original question, I am not sure if tasks are a good solution to
that problem, since most cloud images are not built with debian-installer.
What would be the advantage over simple metapackages ?
(Side comment, in the Debian Med project, there is a "med-cloud" metapackage
that installs as many tools as possible, provided that each of them is small
enough and does not pull large components such as graphical user interfaces,
etc.)
For the reverse process of slimming down the images, it is a bit harder to
coordinate, but currently it is done ad-hoc with the cloud image building
tools. (Which is why we do not have less or killall in the Amazon images).
Ideally wouldn't it be good to make the whole Debian benefit of this work, by
adjusting priorities of packages accordingly ?
Have a nice day,
--
Charles Plessy
Debian Med packaging team,
http://www.debian.org/devel/debian-med
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan
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