[fedora-virt] libguestfs broken dependencies on Fedora 10

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 07:19:28PM +0200, Ján ONDREJ (SAL) wrote:
>   during reading FWN I see, that not only I don't like broken dependencies
> in Fedora repositories. I have an suggestion, how to fix this and make it
> functional for Fedora 10.
> 
>   Richard, can you add qemu-0.10 (at least binary) into libguestfs package
> for Fedora 10? Please change you spec file, add qemu sources, compile
> qemu-kvm as alternate name, like qemu-kvm-libguestfs and configure your
> libguestfs to use this version of qemu/kvm.

This is certainly one way to do it.  Bundling a whole qemu binary is
arguably as bad as breaking dependencies isn't it?

I also had a go at backporting the changes to qemu that we ship in
F-10.  qemu in F-10 is based on qemu 0.9, and doesn't include the
vmchannel patch.  The vmchannel patch looks deceptively simple:

http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2009-02/msg01042.html

However when I started to backport it, I discovered that the patch
depends on many extra functions and features added to slirp since
qemu 0.9.  I ended up with a qemu which compiled, but kept
segfaulting, and it was tricky to diagnose exactly why.

>   I don't use libguestfs rpm package yet, but using libguestfs from git
> repository with succes in similar way. I have only qemu-kvm copyed from
> rawhide as alternate name and compiled libguestfs as described above.
> Everything works fine.
> 
>   Installing qemu-0.10 from rawhide into my Fedora 10 resulted always with
> qcow2 image corruptios and this package does not worked for me. May be these
> problems are already fixed, but I still think, this is not a good idea.

Is it really a problem to use the libguestfs and/or qemu packages from
Fedora 11 builds?  You can grab the latest builds out of Koji:

http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/search?match=glob&type=package&terms=libguestfs
http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/search?match=glob&type=package&terms=qemu

This worked OK for me, although I have now moved to using Fedora
11-Preview, and have mostly abandoned Fedora 10.

Rich.

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