open-vm-tools included/installed by default

[Steve Langasek]

Hi Ben,

On Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 10:02:10AM -0700, Ben Howard wrote:
> Now that open-vm-tools is in main, the obvious question is whether or
> not we should include open-vm-tools on the default installation media.
> While open-vm-tools is not explicitly required anymore for a VM to run
> properly, it does offer hypervisor integration:

>   * vmtoolsd: service responsible for the virtual machine status report.
>   * vmware-check-vm: tool to check whether a utility has been started on
>     a physical or virtual machine.
>   * vmware-xferlogs: Dumps logging/debugging information to the virtual
>     machine logfile.
>   * vmware-toolbox-cmd: tool to obtain virtual machine information of
>     the host such as statistics
>   * vmware-user-suid-wrapper: tool to enable clipboard sharing
>     (copy/paste) between host and virtual machine.

> Most users who run a VMware hypervisor want to run some sort of VMware
> tooling. VMware is now recommending open-vm-tools over the priority
> tools and several distributions (SuSE/SLES, Fedora/RHEL 7) are now
> installing these tools by default.

> I would like to propose that we ship the open-vm-tools on the desktop
> and server media and install by default on VMware targets.

What is the reason to ship them on the image?  If these tools only provide
improved integration, that puts them in a class of package that we would
generally install from the network rather than requiring them to be included
on the image, I think - particularly in the case of the desktop image.  For
the desktop, what's most important is the integration with ubuntu-drivers,
so that the need for the extra drivers is detected and they can be
installed; but this doesn't mean they have to be present on the images.

Is there a specific reason to have them included on the server image?  E.g.,
should they be part of a package task?  How do you plan to auto-select these
packages for installation?

-- 
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/
slangasek at ubuntu.com                                     vorlon at debian.org
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