Comment 2 for bug 720440

I understand that overwriting /etc/hosts, just like overwriting /etc/hostname and other important files, can cause problems, depending on how names get assigned by the cloud and how the user wants to configure the system. Similarly, _not_ overwriting them can cause problems; in my case, I discovered this problem because the command "ping `hostname`" didn't work, but "ping localhost" did. So, I would say that each of these overwritings should be optional and should be configurable in a fairly obvious way.

What's bad about the current set up is that it's not obvious that /etc/cloud/templates/hosts.tmpl is in fact completely ignored. I spent a few hours looking through source code and (non-existent) documentation in order to convince myself that there was in fact no way to activate overwriting of /etc/hosts on the basis of that template. So it's misleading that that file exists, since some files in /etc/cloud/templates/ are used, and some aren't, and without reading source code, there's no way to find out which is which.

If you decide that /etc/hosts should never be overwritten, then please at least remove /etc/cloud/templates/hosts.tmpl. But I'd prefer a compromise: perhaps if hosts.tmpl exists, then it is used to overwrite /etc/hosts, otherwise the original stands. That way a user who wants to disable templates just needs to delete the template file.