[Libguestfs] rsync support

[Tim Potter]

On Tue, 2011-05-24 at 22:12 +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 12:59:50PM -0700, Chris Willmore wrote:
> > Has an rsync addition to libguestfs been considered? It would be
> > great to have when copying the contents of a filesystem to a disk of
> > a different filesystem. It could also be used to keep portions of
> > cloned machines in sync. For example, I'm porting VirtualBox images
> > to Xen. I sometimes make change to the source image that I would
> > like to easily propagate to the Xen copy. DD is sometimes a bit too
> > low-level.
> 
> I think this makes sense.  As a matter of getting changes in
> libguestfs it's better to propose patches and APIs.  You could test
> this out by adding rsync to appliance/packagelist.in, and then adding
> some APIs to libguestfs (see [0] and example [1]).  Post the patches
> here and we can review them.

Can I put in a vote for rsync as well?  I think it would be a very
useful addition to guestfs.

I'm not sure how a streaming network protocol like rsync is going to fit
in to guestfs's command/response protocol though.  A generic method for
forwarding TCP to qemu (host? guest? what's it called?) might be good,
and also allow other commands that are implemented over a TCP/IP
transport to be added as well.


Tim.

> 
> Rich.
> 
> [0] http://libguestfs.org/guestfs.3.html#extending_libguestfs
> 
> [1] http://git.annexia.org/?p=libguestfs.git;a=commitdiff;h=4ffa2d6798f7a2bf0baec8e1084659cf6358bc31
>