Re: Removing google-guest-agent from Debian?
> This was discussed during yesterday's cloud team meeting. To summarize
Thanks for the summary, Noah!
> My question is, is it still needed?
The agent does a fair number of things[0]. Many of those things can
also be done by cloud-init, and in cases where cloud-init is also used
(Ubuntu) we configure the agent to let cloud-init do its thing, but
the guest agent still does the rest.
The next major revision of the agent will have a plugin system to
allow users to add (at their option) other functionality that is
currently provided by other agents.
For the most general cases, it's not _needed_. But the more direct
question is if it's needed _in Debian's package repositories_. Noah
gave a good summary of why it may not be, given how Debian is
currently used on GCE.
> If needed I think I can try to have a look at it
I think we're not there yet - I want to close the question of if it
gets removed instead first.
But if it's needed, we hope the Debian packaging files we maintain[1]
are useful, and that we can collaborate on keeping them up to date for
Debian.
Another challenge might be Go requirements. Historically I don't think
we've maintained compatibility with older Go compilers, and Go being a
Google project we get internal prodding to update to the latest for
security fixes.
Kind regards,
Andrew
[0] https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/guest-agent/blob/main/README.md
[1] https://github.com/GoogleCloudPlatform/guest-agent/tree/main/packaging/debian
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