Re: Removing google-guest-agent from Debian?
On Thu, Nov 14, 2024 at 07:16:32PM +0000, kuLa wrote:
> > Debian images on Google Cloud use the build from
> > packages.cloud.google.com, and there are build errors[0] with the
> > version in Debian. We think the right thing might be to remove the
> > package from Debian, but we're unsure how to make that happen and need
> > guidance. Or there may be better alternatives.
>
> My question is, is it still needed? I've stopped using VMs long time ago and am
> not sure right now, hence my question.
>
> > How do we get this package removed from Debian?
> > Or what should we do instead to resolve the problems?
> >
> > One obvious answer might be to maintain the package. We don't have any
> > Debian maintainers in our team, and if Debian users on GCE are using
> > the version we maintain here, we're unsure of the value users would
> > get from our efforts.
>
> If needed I think I can try to have a look at it and potentially help to bring
> it to the usable state, tho to be a bit more useful I'd have to pic up Golang
> first.
This was discussed during yesterday's cloud team meeting. To summarize
the situation,
* Google publishes their own google-guest-agent packages in repositories
that they maintain. This packaging is independent from the packaging
within Debian and is always kept up-to-date with the upstream project.
* Google publishes their own Debian VM images for the Google cloud that
include their google-guest-agent packages.
* Debian does not publish VM images to the Google cloud. There's
nothing stopping us from doing so, but since Google already does,
there's never been any need and it's unlikely they'd see much use.
Consequently, there is approximately zero usage of the
google-guest-agent packages maintained by Debian.
Naturally this raised the question of whether the "Debian" images
available in the Google cloud should actually be considered a derivative
distribution. The google-guest-agent package is not the only bundled
package that does not come from Debian; there are various cloud service
SDK and CLI packages included within it as well that do not come from
Debian (and in some cases are not distributed by Debian at all).
If we ignore the SDK and CLI packages and focus solely on
google-guest-agent, we did discuss the possibility of keeping the
Debian-shipped packages up-to-date via stable point releases. The
stable release team has indicated their support for such an approach to
packages like this. However, even a quarterly release cadence (for
stable) or semi-annual cadence (for oldstable) would not be as fast as
they'd like. Google would prefer that up-to-date packages are available
for their customers as soon as they're released.
So, I'm not sure there's much value in getting google-guest-agent
refreshed in Debian. It still won't be used in the images that people
are running on the Google cloud.
This issue has been discussed multiple times over the years at the
Debian cloud sprints, and it remains unsolved. Most of the
participating commercial clouds (Azure and AWS, in particular) just
ignore the issue, since they don't publish Debian images; Debian
publishes them and is ultimately responsible for what versions of the
packages are included in them. It's a bigger issue for Google, since
they do publish the images, and their images diverge from what's in
Debian.
noah
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