[Libguestfs] Rethinking appliance building

[Richard W.M. Jones]

The febootstrap 3.0 package is now available:

http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/febootstrap/
http://git.annexia.org/?p=febootstrap.git;a=commitdiff;h=66a9d53e48f14d7fe1d9f4b801a1c5582d83efa6

libguestfs 1.7.19 includes a relatively large set of changes to build
using febootstrap 3.0:

http://git.annexia.org/?p=libguestfs.git;a=commitdiff;h=6d75ce8e6ca1f3f0a946ee4e214f6d2bff07adc4

This has been tested on Fedora 14 and Debian 5.05.

There are a few issues described below.

On Fedora:

- The yum dependency resolving script fails if the yum repos are out
of date.  If you get an error during 'make' which seems to indicate
the yum is trying to write to one of the root-owned yum directories,
you need to do 'sudo yum update' (don't need to actually install any
packages), then repeat the operation.  I'll ask the yum maintainers
how to fix this.

On Debian:

- /sbin/insmod.static is not packaged on Debian.
febootstrap-supermin-helper needs this in order to build the
appliance.  I ended up building a version by hand.

- qemu is ancient.  You need qemu 0.13 from experimental.

- kernel 2.6.32 is ancient.  You need to upgrade to 2.6.36 from
experimental.

- udev gives a big scary warning in the appliance about how it is
being run interactively (not actually true) and then pauses for 60
seconds.  The warning is wrong, but this means that the Debian
appliance has an unnecessary 60 second wait during launch.

- The test for db_dump / db_load in configure is wrong somehow (not
looked at this closely yet).  As a result the phony images in images/
cannot be built during 'make check'.

- There are a handful of failing tests on Debian.  Not looked closely
but doesn't seem too serious.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
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