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,
-- 
Steve Langasek                   Give me a lever long enough and a Free OS
Debian Developer                   to set it on, and I can move the world.
Ubuntu Developer                                    http://www.debian.org/
slanga...@ubuntu.com                                     vor...@debian.org

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