Re: Bug#746394: Please consider shipping pre-built images in Debian packages

[Olivier Berger <olivier.berger@telecom-sudparis.eu>]

Hi.

Charles Plessy <plessy@debian.org> writes:

> One reason why bootstrap-vz exists is that broader frameworks such as
> Debian-Installer have more constraints and are harder to learn and maintain.
> In particular, Debian-Installer does not run as a simple command that prepares
> a tarball on a user's hard drive; it is a minimal Debian system that runs
> by itself.
>
> But I think that attempts to build larger frameworks than bootstrap-vz will end
> up re-inventing an installer for Debian.  So for a Grand Unification I
> recommend to work on Debian-Installer directly.
>

With respect to docker (in the context of #746394), I think that the
providing of images should be much lighter than what the Debian
installer usually does.

AFAIU, docker containers are meant to be very lightweight, compared to
installing on real hardware, and whereas it would be sad to reinvent the
wheels the d-i is already providing, I think that much of its work is to
detect hardware and configure appropriately, which is completely useless
in the context of docker, since there's no hardware emulation, no real
virtual machine, just a chroot-like container (LXC based), at least in
the usual use of docker containers based on LXC running over Linux.

So bootstrap-vz running debootstrap is probably much of what we need for
a bootstrap-vz Docker provider, I guess (and the devil which is in the
details).

Hope this makes sense.

Best regards,
-- 
Olivier BERGER <olivier.berger@it-sudparis.eu> - OpenPGP: 5819D7E8
Ingénieur Recherche - Dept INF - T&MSP (http://www.it-sudparis.eu)