Post by Chris HofstaedtlerIn theory, if we don't want to explicitly install the package in d-i,
another possibility might be to bump it to Priority: standard and let
tasksel install it. I'm not sure what the tradeoffs might be that would
drive the decision one way or another.
[..]
Regarding tasksel vs. Priority, the latter has a potential for a much
wider impact: lots of Debian system are installed without d-i and/or
tasksel, and most if not all would get the package via Priority. (Think
of all the tools building Debian images, chroots, containers, etc., on
top of debootstrap/mmdebstrap/etc.)
I'm not sure it's the case that most of those other systems install
Priority: standard. Debootstrap certainly doesn't by itself, and I
don't think the debuerreotype tool for building OCI images does either.
In any case, your point still stands. I'll re-assign this to general
for now, and we can discuss the options in a broader context.
We have a mechanism for installing iputils-ping into "most" systems, why
not use the same mechanism to install linux-sysctl-defaults?
Systems that want iputils-ping likely also want
linux-sysctl-defaults.
Both iputils-ping and systemd declare Recommends on
linux-sysctl-defaults. The expectation is very much that it's installed
everywhere by default. The only reason it isn't today is that those
packages are installed by deboostrap, which doesn't install Recommends.
I believe that it's important for linux-sysctl-defaults to be part of
the default installation except in unusual cases. In addition to the
"make ping work" sysctl, it sets a number of other important sysctls
that should be set by default (e.g. net.core.default_qdisc,
fs.protected_symlinks, net.ipv4.conf.default.rp_filter and others).
These are system-wide settings that we don't want changed with the
installation of some package after the fact.
There are at least a couple of ways we can accomplish this:
* Raise the linux-sysctl-defaults priority to 'standard', which will get
it installed by tasksel under d-i while still leaving it out of other
debootstrapped installations (containers, etc)
* Raise its priority to 'important', in which case debootstrap will
install it
And there are probably more.
noah