RE: Reading archives..
> De : Stefano Zacchiroli [mailto:zack@debian.org]
> Envoyé : mardi 13 novembre 2012 15:53
> À : debian-cloud@lists.debian.org
> Objet : Re: Reading archives..
>
> On Mon, Nov 12, 2012 at 09:36:10PM +0000, Pierre Couzy wrote:
> > > OTOH I'm not sure that is the case for the Azure images, as of yet?
> > > Pierre?
> >
> > Debian images for Windows Azure must use a dedicated provisioning
> > agent. This agent has an Apache 2 licence, and is available on github
[snip]
> > Is that license okay or do you want me to investigate other options ?
>
> Apache 2 license is perfectly fine.
>
> Do you know if the packaging in the working has been submitted for integration
> into Debian proper?
To be honest, I have no clue of what "proper" means in this context. I have begun to read a lot of things on packaging, but it's not a small task. If someone with expertise in that domain is willing to spend an hour with me it will speed things up.
>
> > About packaging : Windows Azure packages images in VHD format. I
> > currently use hyper-v to create and manage VHD files but there's other
> > options if needed.
>
> Yes, that's one of the blocker I had in mind, that others Debian developers have
> already mentioned prior to the creation of this list. I understand hyper-v is non-
> free. We'd rather build the VHD images using the free alternatives. If you, or
> anyone else, could give them a spin and test the results, that would be great.
>
Technically speaking, hyper-v is not needed, as the final output is a VHD file. That being said, the installer needs to probe a lot of things on the virtual machine, and those are the hardware exposed by hyper-v. We could probably mimic all of those, but it seems fragile, and we would still need to deploy on hyper-v (or Azure) to check everything works.
>From that conclusion I see several paths :
1/ We don't care, and will maintain the required components, plus an installation guide for those who want to create a new VHD. The hosting of VHD and the tools to create them will be out of scope.
2/ We draft a VHD that bootstraps a debian installation + updates (this is what the Drupal people did for Drupal 7 : every Drupal 7 test deployment was bootstrapped by a small Drupal 6 specialized profile. That Drupal 6 bootstrapper gets no updates, and has no dependencies on anything non-free). This is probably the route to go if you want a fully automated generation process asap, but I'll need help to understand how it should work.
3/ We focus on the current version of hyper-v/azure, get as much info as we can on the hardware part, and use that as a recipe to build VHDs. Obvious downside is it will probably break in the future.
As this is still new, I would suggest we choose the first alternative for the time being, and learn. It should not be very long (a few months ?) before we have something stable and usable, even if the VHDs are hosted somewhere else. At that point we reassess our options.
Cheers,
Pierre
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