Comment 16 for bug 1305839

I'm not sure our approach on phones should be held up as a benchmark here, it was a pragmatic solution to rapid iteration on devices that weren't built for Ubuntu. It's also code that we "control" (from the point of view of us shipping it in the archive, us being able to audit and fix it, etc).

Even if we take away the non-free part of the argument, is it really sane to have an installer silently grabbing things from third-party non-Ubuntu repositories without the sysadmin first confirming that this is what they want? I'm not arguing this be done on a per-node basis, that's madness. As you say, server installations are automated, and should remain that way.

But, automating installation of nodes doesn't mean that installing and configuring the master needs to also be so silent as to not point out to the user that we intend to fetch drivers from third parties, should their hardware not work out of the box with Ubuntu.

As I pointed out, this feature will fail hard in a well-firewalled network anyway (how many server farms that poke a hole for archive.ubuntu.com, or have a local mirror, will have a hole poked for ppa.launchpad.net? My bet is pretty close to zero). So, by warning them up front of our intent, we can also point out that they might need to read the config and poke some firewall holes too (or mirror the content locally and change the config to point to it).

I understand the urge to automate this all, but I not only feel it's dangerously close to dishonest, I also suspect it won't at all work in practice, except for test farms on Canonical employees' networks that already have unfettered access to the hosts in question.