Comment 4 for bug 434693

On Wed, 23 Sep 2009, Martin Pitt wrote:

> Thanks for the heads-up. I roughly know the setup, but my main concern
> is that this is not at all a "software package" in the real sense, but
> more like an installer or image builder thing.

Well, its a software package that provides a boot time user hook. That
hook can be used for anything. In my opinion, its not terribly different
installing an empty rc.local and telling the user to do custom things
there.

> Couldn't the package be by and large turned upside down, and instead
> of playing evil tricks to change the system that it gets installed on,
> rather wrap vmware-builder and change the system that it is building?
> That would be so much cleaner and safer IMHO.

We do intend users to 'rebundle' our images, or build ones of their own.
However, either of those options is tremendously heavyweight when compared
to the ability to boot an instance of ubuntu-server on ec2 by typing a
single command. It starts in a minute and costs you $0.10 USD per hour.

You can feed that 10 cent instance a script to run on boot that says "pull
down my php stack and then start apache, register with a dyndns service
and start selling my trinkits"

> > The rightscale-init can largely be viewed here as a "post-install" or
> > "first-boot" script for a full OS install.
>
> Why isn't it possible to do most of this setup when building the
> image?

It is possible to rebundle or create new images with vmbuilder. Its just
expensive in terms of time, storage, network, maintenance when compared to
adding changes to an existing one.

> > We have been discussing a way for the ec2-init to make the ec2-init
> > package inert if it believes that it is not running on a ec2 compatible
> > cloud.
>
> Right, I'm afraid this needs to be the minimum requirement. But even
> with that, it's still quite a hack and circumvents the normal way we
> use to do safe package installation.

Ok. I'll open a bug for this, and we'll see that it gets fixed.