Re: Long-overdue slides and notes from the DC13 official Debian images BoF

[Lucas Nussbaum <lucas@debian.org>]

Hi,

Thanks for the slides and the notes.

On 21/10/13 at 13:25 -0700, Jimmy Kaplowitz wrote:
> Lucas gave me some thoughts privately when I sent this to him a while back,
> but I'll leave it to him to repost his thoughts publicly.

Right.

So. The added value of official Debian images is _trust_. The user of
such images can trust Debian as they would for a standard server, and
doesn't have to spend some time using the 'cruft' package to decruft the
images and find possible customizations that the image builder might
have done (e.g. non-standard settings to some daemons; non-standard
daemons).

So, we should stick to "default Debian" as much as possible.
What does "default Debian as much as possible" mean?
Probably:
 Content of base Debian installation with default configuration
  +
 What is required for the instance to process user-data, in order
 to allow boot-time customization. That means cloud-init, or a
 stripped down version of cloud-init.
  +
 'ssh' task (a Cloud image without an SSH server wouldn't make much
 sense, even if users could install it with user-data)

I understand that those images are basically useless as is. But as is
a basic debian installation. It's up to the user to use that instance
to create his own customized and useful image or server instance.

Additionally, we could rely on tasksel's tasks to provide other
selections of packages, to provide useful-by-default images. Building
those on top of existing packages set mechanisms (tasksel) means that
it benefits everybody and not just the Cloud use case.

Lucas