Comment 6 for bug 1923045

Hi Hadmut and thanks for your additional debugging work here and for sharing your findings.

I agree this looks like a documentation issue: especially the fact that the 'identity' and 'user-data/users' sections are mutually exclusive and 'lock_passwd' need better documentation and possibly some examples. I think this belongs to subiquity (the Ubuntu Server installer) and not to cloud-init, so I added a new subiquity bug task.

The fact the user does not exist immediately after rebooting the newly installed system is normal: cloud-init needs some time to finish initializing the system. This is done at first boot.

On the issue you mentioned about cloud-init remaining active after first boot: I encourage you to file bugs for specific issues, but it's very likely that the cloud-init behaviors that caused you headaches are due to design choices made to accommodate common cloud usage scenarios. This said: there is certainly room for improvement in many aspects and good bug reports are always more than welcome.

Back to the auto-install issue this report is about: I'm setting the cloud-init task to Invalid, and leave the subiquity task open. Should you still think this is a cloud-init bug please comment back and change the task status back to New, we'll look at this again. Thanks!