> 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
