"default virt server"

[Garrett Holmstrom]

On 2/28/2010 20:17, Jeremy Katz wrote:
> The problem with the whole AOS/jeos/minimal OS idea is that it's a
> race to the bottom.  There's this whole sub-culture of "let's see just
> how tiny we can make it because *clearly* it's easier to add things
> than remove them" when the end result of that is just a kernel and a
> shell.
>
> I don't know, I just don't find that interesting or useful[1].  I'd
> rather actually have utilities and the things I'd expect to find on a
> Fedora system and not have to play games downloading packages for ages
> and paying the bandwidth charges to do so as well.

I can see where you're coming from; a VM should certainly be useful out 
of the box.  But I view this not as a "how small can we make this" 
contest, though, but instead as a "why install stuff that won't likely 
be used" question.  For example, I think it would be silly to assume 
that most Fedora VMs will be web servers and install httpd by default.

Last I heard, the plan was to host a Fedora mirror in every availability 
zone, hopefully making concerns about bandwidth charges for yum 
downloads baseless.  What people do have to pay for, though, is S3 
storage for images and EBS volumes that are based on public Fedora 
images.  I would certainly appreciate having a base image that starts 
out a few hundred MB lighter on things I don't need if possible - 
multiple EBS volumes add up quickly.

So what starting point would make sense for most users, given that 
everyone just gets shell access to start with?  @core is obviously not 
enough to yield useful EC2 images, but all of @base is too much since it 
includes a bunch of things that don't make sense on EC2 VMs, such as 
Bluetooth, VLAN, and wireless support.