Hi Amy, On Mon, Oct 16, 2023 at 11:22:12AM -0700, Amy Crate wrote: > We have some teams in GCP that would like to make use of the > linux-headers-cloud-amd64 package. Sometimes they are using an image for > longer than the default kernel on that image has a linux-headers package in > the repositories, but would still like to be able to use the image without > a kernel upgrade & reboot. For this reason we'd like to include > linux-headers-cloud-amd64 in our images by default. Any thoughts on this? > Is there a reason not to include this? Can this be incorporated upstream?
IMO the correct way forward for such users is to upgrade even if that means reboting. I think I'm opposed to this change for a few reasons. >From a policy point of view: our images follow the requirements at [1]. Including kernel headers would be a significant deviation from the default Debian experience. I don't think the justification above is sufficient to override this concern. >From a practical point of view: it'd increase the size of the images for one idiosyncratic use case. Note that the linux-headers-amd64 transitive dependencies include kbuild, gcc, binutils, and a significant number of shared libraries. That also increases the mirror traffic for updates and the security surface area that people's scanners will complain about. Ross [1] - https://wiki.debian.org/Teams/DPL/OfficialImages
