is memtest86+ useful in ubuntu-standard ?

[Scott Moser]

On Tue, 10 Dec 2013, Steve Langasek wrote:

> On Mon, Dec 09, 2013 at 08:47:39PM -0500, Scott Moser wrote:
> > Hey all,
> >   Looking at the contents of the cloud images, memtest86+ is one of the
> > packages that I questioned the necessity of in a cloud image.
> >   That is in the cloud images as cloud images are ubuntu-server and
> > ubuntu-standard tasks plus a small amount of other packages.
>
> >  memtest86+ was added to standard on 2006-06-20.
>
> >  Do we still feel that it is necessary as part of the default install ?
>
> >  If people do still feel it is useful as part of the default install, is
> > there a reasonable way we can explicitly exlude it from cloud images
> > without removing 'ubuntu-standard' ?
>
> I agree that this could reasonably be removed from standard; since memtest
> is only usable by rebooting the system, I don't think it's a "standard" part
> of the system at all and could be moved to a different seed.  Certainly it
> doesn't make sense to pull it into things like cloud images, where we may
> not have control of the bootloader... or access to the console.
>
> Colin, it looks like you were the only person to have ever touched this
> package in the seeds - and that only to move it from minimal to standard.
> Do you think we can move memtest86+ somewhere higher in the stack, so that
> it's only included on images that will run on real hardware?  Should it even
> still be installed by default on desktops/servers, or is having it available
> on the install media sufficient?

I'd suggest media is sufficient.  Its a "nice to have" there for sure.
That said, we've come a long way since 2006.  If I really wanted to run
memtest, and wasn't able to 'apt-get install' it because I had bad memory,
I might just google 'memtest ISO' or 'memtest USB'.

I won't make any other argument for it being on media though.  I see the
value, and personally don't really care there.