[Libguestfs] Plans for libguestfs

Richard W.M. Jones
2011-08-04T07:27:48Z

On Thu, Aug 04, 2011 at 01:04:40AM +0200, Hilko Bengen
wrote:
> During last week, I finally got some packages for libguestfs and
> bindings done. The repository at
> git://anonscm.debian.org/pkg-libvirt/libguestfs.git has been updated to
> 1.10.6-2 which I have also uploaded to experimental. (The packages
> haven't appeared in the archive yet, though.)
>
> Before shifting my attention to the 1.12 release, I'd like to make sure
> that things work as expected. Please test the packages. I haven't had
> any opportunity to test anything so far because during this last week I
> lacked access to a KVM-capable machine.
>
> An outstanding issue is how the appliance, the archive of files, mostly
> executables and libraries, needed to operate the VM, should be handled:
> Having it generated at build-time and shipping it as part of a .deb
> would be suboptimal both from a security and a maintenance perspective.
> For now, I have modified the build system a bit so that the build script
> and package lists are generated. I have added a README.Debian that tells
> the user how to call what script to manually generate the appliance
> after the package has been installed.

I'm interested to know what the security/maintenance objections are.
We ship the *supermin* appliance in Fedora, precisely because it
improves security and maintenance.

One specific issue is that your users will need to rebuild the
appliance after installing any security patch.  With the supermin
appliance, there's no need to do this -- updated binaries or libraries
are included automatically next time libguestfs is launched.

> I think that there should be a /usr/sbin/update-guestfs-appliance script
> that may be called from postinst if the user asks via Debconf.
>
> Another issue has to do with the Python bindings: The
> autoconf/automake-based build system will only build the bindings for
> one Python version (which happens to be 2.6 at the moment). I would like
> to change that, but I haven't found an easy way short of rebuilding
> (almost) the wohle package for every Python version.

I guess we only have one version of Python at a time in Fedora.

Could we do something like adding a ./configure --disable-library
option, allowing you to disable everything (except Python) and thus
just rebuild Python bindings?

> Any comments and patches/contributions are welcome, of course.

Rich.

--
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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