[09:29] <meena> holmanb: shouldn't that just produce distro defaults? 
[14:30] <holmanb> meena: if no path_cfgs is provided, the defaults are hard-coded (`/run/cloud-init` for the run_dir attribute)
[14:59] <meena> holmanb: oh… is there a way to ask distro for default Paths?
[15:01] <holmanb> meena: I think that this is a chicken/egg in the case of the Paths call in stages
[15:02] <meena> the egg was there first. but the thing that laid the egg wasn't quite a chicken, but then the thing that hatched from the egg was
[15:03] <holmanb> well yes :)
[15:03] <holmanb> the Init().distro property is populated by reading the system configuration.... which it gets from the Paths obect that is populated without a configuration
[15:04] <holmanb> so maybe it doesn't matter in that case, if /run/cloud-init/ isn't used in getting the config path
[15:06] <holmanb> but I haven't investigated that fully
[15:11] <holmanb> and since the runtime config is stored in the ephemeral directory I'm guessing that this might actually matter
[15:13] <holmanb> maybe it doesn't matter for discovering configured distro, but a re-read after identifying the distro might be required to get the datasource_list that ds-identify writes into /var/run/cloud-init/cloud.cfg, if the config that is read using Paths({}) gets cached anywhere