Comment 4 for bug 1272115

> What effect will this have on users who *are* relying on the current behaviour?

The effect will be minimial, if any. SmartOS has the concept of user-data, which is a channel for sending raw data. In the case of cloud-init, users would be more likely to be confused by something acting on the data. By having cloud-init follow the documented use-case, cloud-init becomes functional.

Further, I would argue that if cloud-init is acting on user-data, there is actually a danger depending on the payload of the user-data. For example, if the user-data payload is a destructive script that is supposed to be run by something other than cloud-init it could result in system failure.

Given that we introduced SmartOS recently wtih 13.10, the impact here will be minimial. There is no public cloud vendor that is currently using cloud-init. Finally, this change was requested by the SmartOS upstream maintainers.