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Re: Definition of output of cloud project and discussion about possibly needed policies



Hi Tyler,

On 14/04/14 at 07:25 -0700, Tyler Riddle wrote:
> [...]
>
> There are going to be some tough questions here and while reading them please ask yourself the following question: whom is the work of the cloud team supposed to be helping?
> 
> 1) Exactly what is the charter of the cloud team? Why is it here? 
> 
> 2) Is the cloud team producing official Debian images? If not why are the published Debian Wheezy images not clearly labeled as being Debian Wheezy (cloud edition containing experimental software)
> 
> 3) If the cloud team publishes official images where are policies regarding what is and is not allowed to be published and labeled as Debian Wheezy and/or stable as time goes on?
> 
> 4) Why do the cloud images contain customizations such as changing the administrative username to admin instead of root?

As Jimmy pointed out, this was the topic of a BOF at DebConf.

With my DPL hat on, my position, which I previously expressed in [1], is
that an official Debian Cloud image should be "Standard Debian" +
"required Cloud-specific customizations".

"Standard Debian" is quite easy to define (e.g., as the result of a base
Debian installation with default configuration).

"required Cloud-specific configuration" is a bit more blurry. There's
SSH. There's what's needed for processing user-data (cloud-init). What
else?

I agree with you that unnecessary divergence from classical Debian images
is a bad thing, and that differences should be documented. (To the
-cloud@ folks:) Is there such a documentation?

Of course, the Cloud is a specific use case, that might require changes
in the way we currently ship Debian. But those changes should be made
project-wide as much as possible, rather than limited to the Cloud
context.

You mention that one has to log in using 'admin' rather than 'root'.
Isn't that a rather standard change in Cloud images?
Are there other changes that you feel are not justified?

I have no experience with GCE images. My (limited) understanding, from
the DC13 BOF, is that limitations of the GCE infrastructure
unfortunately require us to make more changes than what we would like.

I just retried AWS image, and besides the addition of cloud-init and
SSH, and the need to log in with 'admin', I haven't seen anything
different from classical Debian installs (according to 'debfoster' and
'cruft').

Thanks,

Lucas

[1] https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/2013/10/msg00046.html

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