[akerl_]

It feels odd to complain about "tools doing black magic" when the new way is "cloud init, a tool used by a ton of infra platforms" and the old way is "drop a file in this directory and it will somehow get slurped into the right space at the right time".

[ahepp]

Isn't cloud init just slurping its own config file, then generating the "real" config files and slurping those into the right spaces?

To me, "copies a file named wpa_supplicant.conf from /boot to /etc on first init" is simpler than "parses some yaml, the generates /etc/wpa_supplicant".

Maybe I'd find it worthwhile if I had encountered cloud init years ago before I invested in learning the other 900 linux networking configuration tools, but now it just feels like a case of XKCD 927 (+1 competing standards). If cloud init is even better, it definitely doesn't seem 10x better to be worth the change.

[akerl_]

Cloud init is a tool with documentation and a file format for config, that’s used all over the place.

I’m not making the case that it’s better, just that it’s no more “black magic” than wpa_supplicant’s config file is, and it’s less magical than dropping a wpa_supplicant file into /boot and the raspberry pi doing a bespoke RPi-specific shuffle to move it into place.

[ahepp]

It's doing the same thing

https://github.com/raspberrypi/rpi-imager/blob/5aeb98e976326...