[fedora-virt] libguestfs under Debian / Ubuntu

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 09:11:51PM +0200, Tim Tassonis wrote:
> Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
>> On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 06:09:50PM +0200, Tim Tassonis wrote:
>>> Hi all
>>>
>>> Just came across libguestfs and, as a qemu user, this project really  
>>> sound fantastic to me.
>>>
>>> However, when I tried to compile the latest tarball, I failed,  
>>> mainly because of the inavalability of febootstrap, which obviously 
>>> does not exist under ubuntu, and cannot be installed due to the lack 
>>> of yum under ubuntu at least.
>>
>> Even though Debian/Ubunut use APT for their package mgmt system, there
>> should not be any problem installing the YUM + RPM libraries. This  
>> should allow febootstrap to be built & run, and not impact your host  
>> OS package mgmt
>
> Yes, of course....but since it is mentioned that febootstrap is based on  
> debootstrap, is there a technical reason for not just supporting  
> debootstrap alternatively. I haven't got enough background regarding  
> debootstrap/febootstrap and libguestfs to make a judgement about this  
> though.

I summarised the options here:

http://www.redhat.com/archives/fedora-virt/2009-May/msg00003.html

For the Debian package I went with option (1), since Debian already
has yum and rpm packaged.

> But to require any distribution to install yum/rpm just for this library  
>  seems a bit intrusive to me. Requiring a specific distro packaging  
> system for a package seems a bit distribution dependant to me.

It's not like that.  Just because Debian ship yum doesn't mean that
anyone has to abandon apt.  yum under Debian is only used where
someone wants to install an RPM-based distro from a Debian host,
eg. as a chroot, or in a virtual machine, or (as in this case) to
build an appliance.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Emerging Technologies, Red Hat  http://et.redhat.com/~rjones
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