[fedora-virt] libguestfs under Debian / Ubuntu

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 01:14:07AM +0200, Emre Erenoglu wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 11, 2009 at 10:24 PM, Daniel P. Berrange<berrange at redhat.com> wrote:
> >
> > that repo. libguestfs uses a febootstrap to install a custom Fedora 11
> > appliance which it boots within QEMU in order to access the filesystems.
> 
> If the sole purpose of febootstrap is to install a custom F11
> appliance to boot in qemu, why don't we prepare this image beforehand,
> put it somewhere on the web, so that libguestfs can just use it
> without needing to build this appliance again in each machine with
> febootstrap or debootstrap?

Providing pre-built binary OS images gets you into potentially complicated
license compliance issues. You as distributor of the binary have to comply
with the license of every single piece of software that went into the
binary. For the Fedora Project distributing a binary image of a Fedora
distro, compliance is easy because Fedora already ships all source RPMs.
If a non-Fedora entity wants to ships binaries of Fedora it needs to make
sure it can provide the corresponding source. It is not clearcut that it
can rely on Fedora to always ship the sources for it.  The safe option is
to always build from source and distribute everything you used to build
yourself. This is actually an argument *for* Debian using debootstrap
against a Debian repo, rather Debian using feboiotstrap+YUM + Fedora repos.

Regards,
Daniel
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