Hi all,
thanks again Zach for organising this Sprint.
I just looked again at the time zone difference between Japan and Seattle, and
I realised that it will be too hard for me to be available remotely.
Nevertheless, if you could discuss about maintenance of cloud-init, I would be
very happy.
On my side, it is still a challenge, and a pressure, to give proper time to
this package. At the moment, I do not have opportunities to use it regularly,
which leaves me in the situation where I can do patch pushing, but have no deep
understanding on whether things work robustly. I would be releived if there
were a more visible team taking care of it. In my experience, there are two
main difficulties. First, the upstream authors do not issue frequent point
releases. It means that to bring a bug fix in Debian, one needs either to
wait, or to patch, or to grab one of the bzr snapshots used as upstream release
in the Ubuntu packages (which are de facto point releases). Second, we are
downstream of Ubuntu. It means that either we duplicate work, or we end up in
odd situations when trying to follow their packaging work (for instance with
the translation process). None of this is too hard to solve, but it adds some
overhead to the time needed for taking a proper care of the package, so please
be warned.
Since I will not be present, here are some very brief news on my attempts to
use Debian-Installer in the AWS. I have updated the instructions on the wiki
to use the latest `aws` command line utility instead of `euca2ools`. Following
these instructions, one can make a bootable D-I image that will install Debian
in a volume, and turn that volume in an image. Using network-console, the
whole installation can be done interactively. Next, I would like to write a
preseed file to automate the installation. While aiming at this, I first
procrastinated a bit and wrote a Haskell script that parses all Debconf
templates from D-I and ouptuts them in a single HTML page, to better document
the possible options. This is where I am now.
https://lists.debian.org/debian-boot/2016/09/msg00075. html
https://wiki.debian.org/Cloud/AmazonEC2DebianInstaller
Have a nice day,
Charles
--
Charles Plessy
Tsurumi, Kanagawa, Japan