Hello, On Fri, Jun 19, 2020 at 09:30:30AM -0500, David Wright wrote: > Why not start with a minimal working system, even adding a few > select tools, and then see what isn't necessary for your own > minimalist system. Now you can try removing them from a *working* > system and, should you go too far, you still have the tools to > diagnose what's gone wrong, and fix it.
The way I handle this is to indeed install a minimal Debian system with d-i and preseeding and then use configuration management software to turn that system into what it is "supposed" to be, There are a plethora of configuration management solutions that are all pretty well documented, and there are multiple choices that have an active vibrant community. I currently use Ansible, other popular choices include Puppet. There are many more. Basically I would advocate doing a minimal job of OS installation in d-i+preseed and then doing the rest in something more understandable and verbose. Given that you can run arbitrary commands in the installed system you can automate anything at all in the configuration management. It also has the advantage of recording the recipe for baking that particular kind of system as an item of code/configuration that gets stored in source code control (e.g. git, subversion, …) forever; changes to it can be documented and reasoned about at a later date. I have explained all this to Richard before but he doesn't appear interested in investigating this, preferring to try to wrangle the d-i for every task. I don't think it's a good strategy. Cheers, Andy -- https://bitfolk.com/ -- No-nonsense VPS hosting
