Comment 26 for bug 1871975

Hi again pengpengs and yhzou,

 Thanks for your patience on this issue.

   We've begun to make progress on this ticket to improve the use-case for reusing live-installed images as the golden-image for cloning.

Because some network configuration values set during installer prompts, wifi passwords, require root-readonly netplan files to ensure that the wifi passwords aren't world-readable.

The cloud-init network renderers doesn't currently have the support in it's network renderers to emit root-readonly subsets of network configuration as separate netplan configuration file with different global permissions based on sensitive data.

As such, subiquity can't use cloud-init network configuration directly at the moment, but I've filed a separate low-weight bug to track this work as it will allow subiquity to use cloud-init's native networking in the future.

In the meantime, we currently have some pull requests coming together that will simplify the golden image creation in VMware a bit planned for the next release of cloud-init 22.3:

1. cloud-init to support a /etc/cloud/clean.d directory to run third party cleanup scripts when
`cloud-init clean` is called
https://github.com/canonical/cloud-init/pull/1581
2. installer (subiquity) to deliver a /etc/cloud/clean.d/99-installer script which will automatically remove any network and DataSourceNone configuration artifacts to allow the installed image to be used for cloning
https://github.com/canonical/subiquity/pull/1347

Any comments or suggestions welcome as we close out on these initial improvements.