[fedora-virt] libguestfs under Debian / Ubuntu

[Daniel P. Berrange]

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.

They are conceptually the same, but different implementations. debootstrap
takes a APT repository and uses a chroot to setup a distro install based 
off the Debian packages in that repo. febootstrap takes a YUM repository 
and uses a chroot to setup a distro install based off the RPM packages in
that repo. libguestfs uses a febootstrap to install a custom Fedora 11
appliance which it boots within QEMU in order to access the filesystems.
You can't use debootstrap to build a Fedora 11 appliance, and vica-verca.
So if you wanted to use debootstrap you'd have to come up with a recipe
that provided the same functionality as the febootstrap recipe. That's
doable, but more work than just installing RPM/YUM libraries IMHO.

Regards,
Daniel
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