Hi,
I would like to propose an idea of including the heat-cfntools
package in the base cloud images provided by Fedora. In the past, I
have been opposed to this idea because our cfntools would conflict
with AWS cfntools. I have found a solution to this problem.
heat-cfntools places its files in /usr/bin. Amazon places their
files (with the same name) in /opt/aws/bin. The heat-cfntools
package provides a script called cfn-create-aws-symlinks which
creates symlinks in /opt/aws/bin to the cfntools in /usr/bin.
If we install heat-cfntools in the base image, heat itself can run
cfn-create-aws-symlinks as part of the bootstrapping process inside
the vm, avoiding any collisions. In effect, the symlinking would
only happen inside a Heat launched vm as part of the bootstrapping
scripts we provide.
For more details of the bootstrapping process used in Heat, please
read:
http://sdake.wordpress.com/2013/03/03/how-we-use-cloudinit-in-openstack-heat/
Other distros such as debian, ubuntu, SUSE, etc can follow this same
model of including heat-cfntools in their distributed qcow2 images.
This would get the heat developers out of the business of providing
prebuilt images like we do here:
http://fedorapeople.org/groups/heat/prebuilt-jeos-images/
Regards
-steve