[Libguestfs] Fwd: Re: febootstrap in Debian

[Richard W.M. Jones]

[CC also to libguestfs mailing list]

On Tue, May 17, 2011 at 08:11:10PM +0200, Guido Günther wrote:
> As to binary debs: I wonder if we can't just get away by adding the
> needed packages as build-depends (so they end up installed on the buildd
> before the package built) and modify febootstrap to look at the
> _installed_ files instead of at the downloaded debs.
> 
> Looking at febootstrap_debian.ml this looks possible but very likely I'm
> missing something. I'm not very good at OCaml though.

I guess the (non-obvious) thing you're missing is that we can't use
installed configuration files, because the sysadmin may have changed
them.  We need the original of all files, and we get those from the
*.debs.

In the special case (and only in this special case) where we are
building on the Debian builders, there's no sysadmin and so no one
could have modified any configuration or other files.

However there may still be other problems I haven't seen.  How to get
the list of files in each package (should be OK: dpkg -L).  How to
resolve the dependencies so we know we have all packages / files?

With the Fedora builders, we have the *.rpm files left around and we
use them.  Is that not the same in the Debian case?

> Is the insmod.static issue somehow resolved? Maybe filing a wishlist bug
> would help?

Still a bug AFAIK.

In Fedora we build module-init-tools from source and we don't do
anything special[1] to get insmod.static, so I'm not sure why it
doesn't exist on Debian too.

> Having febootstrap/libguestfs in Debian would be great, I've met so many
> people asking about it's status! Roland, do you plan to work on
> libguestfs? If so I'd be happy to add you to the pkg-libvirt team.

Hope you can get something worked out.  Let me know if you need any
more help.

libguestfs is legendarily hard to build ...

Rich.

[1] http://pkgs.fedoraproject.org/gitweb/?p=module-init-tools.git;a=blob;f=module-init-tools.spec;hb=HEAD

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