[et-mgmt-tools] [PATCH 11 of 11] virt-convert: Add "virt-instance" formatter

[John Levon]

On Mon, Jul 14, 2008 at 03:21:03PM -0400, Cole Robinson wrote:

> No, setup_install would not be neccessary. You could populate a
> Guest object with all the data imported from another format,
> and then call validate_parms and get_xml_config.

This sounds good, I'll look at doing this.

> > I'm a bit unclear on the need for this to be a requirement. It just
> > seems to be placing unnecessary obstacles in the user's way. You're
> > basically turning the warning above into an error for many situations.
> 
> If we don't require using an active libvirt connection, we will find
> ourselves just duplicating information that is already presented by
> libvirt capabilities xml, such as emulator paths, feature availability
> like pae, and in the future, whitelists for device models, all with
> varying degrees of accuracy.

Hmm. I don't think that's a big deal now at all (since virt-install is
already encoding all this stuff *anyway*). But I thought about it, and
you're right. This could become very tricky in the future.

However, there's still a problem I'm not sure how to deal with: general
export.  In this case we might not even be exporting to a format that
libvirt can even *deal* with, never mind one that's on the other end of
the connection. What do we do in this case?

How can I export to .vmx without hard-coding some stuff based upon
command-line options? Do we require a connection for this, and try to
work out defaults based on the connection anyway? This is less
than ideal: consider the poor user who's not booted under Xen, and wants
to import his Xen VM into VMWare on that machine.

regards
john