Libguestfs - Mar 2014 - Frugalware / pacman-g2 support in supermin 5

Hello Daniel,

Supermin was recently rewritten upstream.  As part of this rewrite,
existing package managers had to be ported to the new codebase.  I did
this for all existing drivers *except* for Frugalware/pacman-g2.  This
is the purpose of this email.

The new API that package managers have to use is here:

https://github.com/libguestfs/supermin/blob/master/src/package_handler.mli#L83

For pacman-g2 it requires that there is a way to:

 (1) quickly
 (2) list the dependencies of
 (3) installed packages
 (4) without downloading anything

Unfortunately I cannot find a way to do satisfy all of these
conditions.  The previous driver did it as a side-effect of
downloading/installing packages into a chroot, but this does not
satisfy conditions (1) & (4).

Arch Linux has a tool called 'pactree -u' which is ideal, and is how
we solve this with pacman.  However Frugalware does not appear to
package this tool.

It may also be possible to do something using libalpm, but I did not
look at this in detail.

Anyway the above explains why the Frugalware driver in supermin 5 does
not work.  If you can suggest how to do the above, or provide patches,
then I may be able to help to re-enable this driver, however at this
time I don't intend to investigate this further.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
Fedora now supports 80 OCaml packages (the OPEN alternative to F#)