Re: cloud-init should not depend on cloud-guest-utils anymore

[Noah Meyerhans]

On Sun, Mar 08, 2020 at 02:49:26AM +0100, Thomas Goirand wrote:
> On 3/7/20 11:53 PM, Thomas Goirand wrote:
> > So in case we'd be removing this dependency to satisfy your container
> > use case (which is IMO very valid), we should carefully re-add a
> > dependency on cloud-utils in our VM images.
> 
> If I may add if it wasn't obvious with what I wrote: our VM images must
> be changed *first* to include the new dependency, before we remove it
> from the cloud-init package.

+1 to the proposal to drop the dependency.  Let's drop it to Recommends,
rather than removing it altogether, though.  And yes, we should update
the debian-cloud-images FAI configuration to ensure that
cloud-guest-utils is still installed in the environments where we're
currently installing it.

noah

Re: cloud-init should not depend on cloud-guest-utils anymore

[Thomas Goirand]

On 3/7/20 11:53 PM, Thomas Goirand wrote:
> So in case we'd be removing this dependency to satisfy your container
> use case (which is IMO very valid), we should carefully re-add a
> dependency on cloud-utils in our VM images.

If I may add if it wasn't obvious with what I wrote: our VM images must
be changed *first* to include the new dependency, before we remove it
from the cloud-init package.

Cheers,

Thomas Goirand (zigo)

Re: cloud-init should not depend on cloud-guest-utils anymore

[Thomas Goirand]

On 3/7/20 1:40 AM, Marco d'Itri wrote:
> Nowadays (since Debian 10) systemd can automatically grow file systems 
> and swap partitions just by adding the x-systemd.growfs flag to fstab.
> This is also important because cloud-guest-utils depends on e2fsprogs, 
> which is not needed in containers and systems with XFS (which has been 
> the RHEL default for a long time, so it is become more and more 
> popular).
> Does anybody have any objections to removing the cloud-guest-utils 
> dependency from cloud-init and using the native systemd service?
> 

Hi Marco,

There's the cloud-init package used in container use case, and the one
in our official Debian image. Both should be taken care of. Let me
expand here.

Cloud-utils also contains ec2metadata and vcs-run, which are a nice
things to have. Some of our users may use it in their userscripts when
launching instances. Not having them anymore in our VM image could be
seen as a regression.

Also, if running on the cloud, our image is using ext4, not XFS. The
issue with XFS is that it cannot shrink, so I don't think we'd be moving
to XFS anytime soon. I do believe it is important to have e2fsprogs
installed too, for this reason.

So in case we'd be removing this dependency to satisfy your container
use case (which is IMO very valid), we should carefully re-add a
dependency on cloud-utils in our VM images.

Your thoughts?

Cheers,

Thomas Goirand (zigo)