Comment 1 for bug 2015949

> Mid-term need is to provide an environmental artifact or mechanism at systemd-generator timeframe to allow cloud-init.service to order After=NetworkManager.service and drop Before=sysinit.target for that use-case.

How broad are we considering this use-case? Any image that uses NetworkManager? Only some specialized NoCloud images? Something else?

This change would cause cloud-init to no longer be blocking "as much of the remaining boot as possible"[1].

Dropping Before=sysinit.target from cloud-init.service could cause other services later in boot that are expecting cloud-init.service to be done by sysinit.target to fail. We could easily test base images, however I don't think this would be sufficient, since any package could provide a service that is ordered After=sysinit.target. Any service that currently orders after sysinit.target and expects cloud-init mounts/disk setup to be complete, for example, could be broken by the proposed change.

[1] https://cloudinit.readthedocs.io/en/latest/explanation/boot.html#network