Comment 0 for bug 725127

Under the blueprint 'cloud-server-n-cloud-images' [1] I was working on tool to resize partitions in existing images.
I've done that work in 2 parts
 * adding 'growpart' to the cloud-utils package
 * adding a new package 'cloud-initramfs-tools'

Adding 'growpart' to the cloud-utils package allows a user to easily do something like:
 * download compressed uec image from [2], uncompress file
 * convert file to 'raw' image type (qemu-img convert -f vmdk -O raw natty-server-uec-amd64-disk1.vmdk disk.img)
 * increase the size from the default ~ 1.5G disk (truncate --size 4G disk.img)
 * rewrite the partition table so that there /dev/sda1 has access to the new space
   growpart disk.img 1

Adding the cloud-initramfs-tools package (and having it cloud-initramfs-growroot inside the UEC image) would allow the user to skip the final step. Having images that automatically respond to a root volume increase will be useful in cloud environments.

I would have had this in yesterday (before Feature Freeze) but I just ran out of time at the end.

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[1] https://blueprints.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+spec/cloud-server-n-cloud-images
[2] http://uec-images.ubuntu.com/server/natty/current/ovf/