I asked Dan Watkins about this and received this reply: In terms of scope, cloud-init does not Depend on genisoimage but does recommend its use in documentation. cloud-image-utils (built from cloud-utils) does Depend directly on it.
It sounds like, if it's going away, genisoimage is going away in bookworm, the Debian stable release after the one that just went into freeze (bullseye). bullseye goes into hard freeze (2021-03-12[0]) after hirsute's Debian import freeze (2021-02-25[1]), so there's no chance that it will affect hirsute. If bullseye is released before ~August (Debian don't have set release dates, they release once it's Ready (TM)), and genisoimage is removed from testing soon after that release, then it may affect us is in I. So from a "when will the wheels fall off in Ubuntu" perspective, we (a) have a decent runway, and (b) will only be affected in the release whose development is open after the removal happens in Debian. That said, cloud-image-utils is in main[2] and therefore all of its dependencies also need to be in main, so we are not free to choose our own replacement unconstrained. We certainly won't be alone in needing to choose a replacement, `apt rdepends genisoimage` indicates that, amongst others, ubuntu-desktop and livecd-rootfs (which is the package used to build not only live CD root filesystems but also ~every other Ubuntu image). IMO, it's not really our place to determine the correct replacement here: this is a tool used across different parts of Ubuntu, so Foundations are likely better placed than we. >From an upstream cloud-init perspective, this indicates to me that we shouldn't be recommending genisoimage to our users in our documentation. The sooner we can document the new method of doing this, the fewer users will be broken by its future removal (whether in Debian, Ubuntu or whenever their distro decides to follow suite). Of course, we should align the docs with what Ubuntu is choosing, so there's a (task) dependency there. [0] https://wiki.debian.org/DebianBullseye [1] https://discourse.ubuntu.com/t/hirsute-hippo-release-schedule/18539 [2] Some details at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/MainInclusionProcess; TL;DR, we support main both in security terms and commercially, so anything that goes into main has to pass muster in terms of supportability. ** Changed in: cloud-init Status: New => Confirmed ** Changed in: cloud-utils (Ubuntu) Status: New => Confirmed -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1915077 Title: genisoimage may be going away To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/cloud-init/+bug/1915077/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
