On Tue, Oct 27, 2020 at 09:58:05AM -0700, Paul Graydon wrote:
If you are considering installations directly from the Deb package, how
do you consider the client software update procedure when the virtual
machine has been running for a while? Snapd has a built-in mechanism for
installing and distributing updates.
That's a good call out. We have a self-updating mechanism built in to the
RPM variant of the agent, and the core logic of it was built sufficiently
generically that we should be able to adapt it to handle DEB packages, if
that's the route we end up going here.
Is this agent required? In other words, is it reasonable to run a VM
instance that doesn't have it installed?
Debian's cloud images specifically do not include software from outside
of Debian's package archive. If we're going to provide pre-built images
via our own infrastructure, then this agent would need to be packaged
for Debian and included in the main archive.
If you want to build derivitive images that are based on our
configuration and associated tooling but have additional software
installed, you are free to use our tooling and configuration as a
starting point. This is, for example, how Google builds the images for
GCE. This allows them to add their own additional apt repositories and
software that is distributed outside the Debian archive.