wireless-tools/wpasupplicant in minimal seed

[Matt Zimmerman]

On Thu, Sep 04, 2008 at 11:35:43AM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 03, 2008 at 06:17:42PM +0100, Matt Zimmerman wrote:
> > On Mon, Sep 01, 2008 at 11:03:08AM +0100, Colin Watson wrote:
> > > Would anyone object to wireless-tools and wpasupplicant being moved to
> > > ubuntu-desktop, and also added to server-ship so that they remain
> > > available on the server CD?
> > 
> > We did agree, once upon a time, that the base system should have what you
> > need to get on the network.  WPA is increasingly popular, surely more so
> > than PPP (which is in standard).
> > 
> > However, it, like ppp, is only needed to get some desktop systems on the
> > network, and practically never for servers.  This is a divergence we didn't
> > consider at the time (perhaps because we didn't have a server edition).
> 
> If we're looking for precedent, we have also long had a category of
> tools which are needed to get onto some networks, but which are
> considered sufficiently rare not to be installed by default. For those,
> we simply ensure that they are on the CD, but we put them in the ship
> seed so that they aren't installed by default. This category includes
> PPTP, some Winmodem software, ISDN, PPPoA, and others.
> 
> On the server, I think wpasupplicant and probably ppp belong in this
> category, hence my suggestion of server-ship.

I agree with your classifications of the above software.  My point, though,
was that we wanted standard to be sufficient to get a system on the network
and install more software, since this is a useful method of bootstrapping a
system.  This won't be possible anymore in cases where a WPA network is the
primary network interface, which is fairly popular.

I think we can probably live with that, but I wanted to make sure this is a
conscious choice.

-- 
 - mdz