[Libguestfs] Status of virt-v2v?

[Mike Latimer]

On Thursday, September 05, 2013 04:47:09 PM you wrote:
> It turns out that progress logging during the conversion isn't all that
> useful. This is because the profile of any conversion is dominated by
> the copy process. And when I say dominated, I mean potentially hours to
> copy guest data, followed by about 1 minute of conversion. It's
> certainly not useful in real time, because the user will have wandered
> off to get coffee long before the conversion process starts, and likely
> won't see it!

Very good points.

> Incidentally, you mention an 'analyzing' step. virt-v2v doesn't really
> have one. It copies, then analyzes and converts in 1 go. One of the
> design goals of guestconv is to allow us to split it into the stages you
> suggest above by having a separate 'inspection' stage.

Yes, the 'analyzing' step I was referring to was really just between 
connecting to the source, and beginning the storage copy. You can error out 
here (if the guest is running, or already exists on the target), and I thought 
some indication of what was going on would be useful.

Progress messages of some form seem to be useful before the file copy starts. 
For example, if SSH keys are not in use, you can get two password prompt in a 
row, which can be a bit confusing. (Anyone doing a lot of this would certainly 
have SSH keys in place though.)

The remaining messages might be better kept in a summary fashion though... 
I'll think about it from that perspective.

-Mike