On Mon, Aug 09, 2010 at 04:56:18PM +0300, Amit Kucheria wrote:
As a followup to a conversation I had with Alexander (asac) on IRC, i'd like to request the addition of some packages to the headless image. This is to make the images more useful out-of-the-box.
- ifplugd (dhcp networking)
ifplugd has always been avoided by default in Ubuntu because at least in the past, trying to use the cable sense support wouldn't work with all chips and could even cause kernel lockups with some of them. Do we know for sure that this is no longer an issue? I'm wary of having our images diverge from Ubuntu on something as fundamental as network configuration, as I don't believe we have the breadth of coverage to avoid regressions.
- screen (multiple terminals over a serial console)
Easy enough to include, but the disk footprint should not be ignored IMHO. I think we need to better define the intended use cases for the headless images; cf. the other thread on linaro-dev about trying to get the image /smaller/ by pruning cached apt data. A single preinstalled image isn't going to be everything to everyone, so we should try to get a clear set of requirements so that it doesn't fail to be anything to everyone.
- vim (or any other more complete editor than the vi that ships with busybox)
ubuntu-minimal, which the linaro images inherit, includes vim-tiny. Is that not sufficient?
- openssh (atleast server)
This is something I always install, but I'm not sure it's a given that we want to install and run it by default in the stock image.
More useful tools to consider (but might be more insteresting only to kernel devs)
- lsusb
--> usbutils
- latencytop
- input-utils
- iotop
usbutils is actually part of ubuntu-standard, a small set of packages we aren't currently including in the preinstalled image but that I think we should consider for inclusion if we're willing to accept a larger footprint. The others are IMHO very niche (not only are they not installed by default in Ubuntu, they're in universe no less) and don't belong on a general-purpose image.
Cheers,