[Libguestfs] [PATCH 0/3] RFC: appliance flavours

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Thu, Oct 02, 2014 at 05:36:22PM +0200, Pino Toscano wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> this is a prototype of something I've around for some time.
> Basically it is about adding new appliances in addition to the main
> one currently used and kept up-to-date automatically: this way it is
> possible to create new appliances with extra packages, to be used in
> specific contexts (like virt-rescue, with more network/recovery tools)
> without filling the main appliance.
> 
> It's still WIP (the most notable lack is a proper base.tar.gz with
> config files of flavour packages), but I'd like to get some feedback
> about it.

My problem with this is that we (Fedora & Debian) do something similar
already:

https://apps.fedoraproject.org/packages/libguestfs-rescue
https://packages.debian.org/search?keywords=libguestfs-rescue

A little bit different because the application (eg. virt-rescue)
doesn't request the extra packages, and also because if the end user
installs libguestfs-rescue then all appliances have the extra packages
whether they need them or not.

I'd say that the first is a packaging issue: virt-rescue might be
packaged into libguestfs-rescue.  The second isn't really a problem
since the size of the appliance doesn't matter (it is loaded on
demand).

Rich.

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