Well I would argue that if you’re using an installer in a VM you’re doing things a bit wrong. Why not use a cloud image?
or also just logging to the console and not having any tui running.
This is my current half-baked plan, yes.
mwhudson:
I’ve updated the docs to add error_commands and reporting sections to the config, made some clarifications to the descriptions of early_commands and late_commands and added something about cloud-init config to ‘possible future directions’
This is a useful change and along with the logging above addresses concerns I initially had about the lack of handling for error cases in the script.
TBH I hadn’t considered the error cases nearly as much as I should have. Score one for asking for feedback!
Not discussed so far and one use case I’m particularly interested in is the ability to install in an isolated or offline network environment, yet have the resulting image be correctly configured to work with e.g. dhcp on boot and have the default repositories set up.
So this should just work™ with the way things are put together in subiquity. The default is to run DHCP on all wired interfaces but only configure it in the target system for interfaces that got a response but this can be overridden.
When trying to do this with preseeding, the installation environment bleeds over into the runtime environment so e.g. if you install without a network the network then isn’t automatically set up in the target, or if you use repositories on a provisioning network the target expects to use those same repositories on boot, which isn’t what I’d like.
So the part about repositories isn’t supported yet – if there is no network at install time, the install process runs with just the repository on the install media available – but it would be fairly simple to add (after all, I had to implement a way to have different apt config for install time to implement the current behaviour). And I guess you can always reconfigure the repository in a late_command.
My main motivation for that use case is to have somewhat reproducible images which are built in an isolated environment and then deployed separately instead of e.g. installing with an internet connection and the installation image having updates installed during the installation, resulting in a different image each time you run the installation script. If this use case can be supported that would be great.
Makes some sense, although in general we do want people to install at least security updates!