building (official) debian images for atlas (formerly vagrantcloud)

[Jan Niggemann <jn@hz6.de>]

Hi list,

following James Brombergers proposal  
(https://lists.debian.org/debian-cloud/2015/04/msg00011.html), I'm  
planning to create official debian boxes and upload them to atlas  
(formerly vagrantcloud).

My planning is roughly the following:
- get to know bootstrap-vz (<- done)
- create a sustainable environment for bootstrapping (<- done)
- create a "alpha" box to gather feedback (<- done, see download link below)
- shrink boxes (eg. remove unused locales, ...)
- figure out how to automate upload of boxes to my own account on atlas
- request delegation from DPL
- do whatever is necessary to setup and maintain an official debian  
account on atlas
- monitor debian-announce and build new boxes when necessary

I'm planning to initially create stable boxes i386 and amd46 and later  
add testing and perhaps oldstable.

For now, I'd very much like the community to test the box below and  
give me some feedback on what to change / improve.

The box file is 181MB and located here:  
http://files.hz6.de/debian-wheezy-i386-150417.box

For completeness' sake I'm including the manifest file I've used to  
create this box:
---
provider:
   name: virtualbox
   guest_additions: /root/images/VBoxGuestAdditions.iso
bootstrapper:
   workspace: /root/images/workspace
image:
   name: debian-{system.release}-{system.architecture}-{%y}{%m}{%d}
   description: Debian {system.release} {system.architecture}
system:
   release: wheezy
   architecture: i386
   bootloader: grub
   charmap: UTF-8
   hostname: localhost
   locale: en_US
   timezone: UTC
packages:
     mirror: http://ftp2.de.debian.org/debian/
volume:
   backing: vmdk
   partitions:
     type: msdos
     root:
       size: 2GiB
       filesystem: ext4
plugins:
   apt_proxy:
     address: 10.11.1.74
     port: 3142
   vagrant: {}
   minimize_size:
     zerofree: true
     shrink: true
   image_commands:
     commands: [ ["cp", "/root/images/01_nodoc",  
"{root}/etc/dpkg/dpkg.cfg.d/"] ]

The 01_nodoc file is my first shot at further reducing the box size:
path-exclude /usr/share/doc/*
# we need to keep copyright files for legal reasons
path-include /usr/share/doc/*/copyright
path-exclude /usr/share/man/*
path-exclude /usr/share/groff/*
path-exclude /usr/share/info/*
# lintian stuff is small, but really unnecessary
path-exclude /usr/share/lintian/*
path-exclude /usr/share/linda/*
# lang
path-exclude /usr/share/locale/*
path-include /usr/share/locale/en*
path-exclude /usr/share/i18n/locale/*
path-include /usr/share/i18n/locale/en*

Have a nice weekend
Jan