[Libguestfs] Rethinking appliance building

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Sun, Dec 05, 2010 at 10:09:58AM -0700, Thomas S Hatch wrote:
> So I am in the process of Adding libguestfs to ArchLinux, should I use
> febootstrap 3 to build a supermin appliance for Arch? And if so
> where exactly should I start, do I need to submit patches for febootstrap
> for Arch support?

Yes please!

This brings me to the second part of the email that I didn't write ...

To support a new package manager, the package manager has to support
some simple operations.

(1) There has to be a way to detect that the package manager should
be used, eg. by looking for /etc/arch-release

(2) There must be a way to take a list of package names, and fully
resolve all dependencies (recursively as necessary) to get a complete
list of packages that must be installed to bootstrap.

(3) Must be a way to download a package.

(4) Must be able to list out the files in a downloaded package.

(5) Must be able to extract a single file from a downloaded package.

(1)-(5) have to work as non-root.

You can use the RPM and Debian plugins for comparison:

http://git.annexia.org/?p=febootstrap.git;a=blob;f=febootstrap_debian.ml;h=c0cfbacd0e3c8b426ec92a06ba0c52fd0a8c4e67;hb=HEAD
http://git.annexia.org/?p=febootstrap.git;a=blob;f=febootstrap_yum_rpm.ml;h=43021ccee7c127f13d582e4d47a5452b0534383e;hb=HEAD

The precise API is described here:

http://git.annexia.org/?p=febootstrap.git;a=blob;f=febootstrap_package_handlers.mli;h=673e4489d6ad957186b94f565d62593062cfe4d6;hb=HEAD#l21

The git repo is down at the moment, but the contents of the tarball
are identical to git right now.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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