[Libguestfs] Fwd: Microsoft Catalog Files and Digital Signatures decoded

[Roman Kagan]

On Tue, Dec 13, 2016 at 06:24:26PM +0000, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> [Forwarding to PUBLIC mailing list]
> 
> On Fri, Nov 25, 2016 at 11:02:29AM +0100, Andreas Schneider wrote:
> > https://github.com/cryptomilk/parsemscat
> 
> Andreas wrote a library for reading MSFT catalog files and digital
> signatures, and the question (for the list) is whether we can use this
> in virt-v2v to parse the virtio driver catalogs.
> 
> It's a C library, so that's a good start.

As you may remember I did something similar last year (in Python) and
this went nowhere because the information in the drivers was unreliable.
I didn't check lately but I guess it still is.

And I tend to think that pulling in yet another dependency in libguestfs
is not really desirable; the driver packaging can sort it all out with
the existing libguestfs' expectations.

I mean, the existing protocol of encoding the driver attribution in the
directory structure is good enough and convenient, and is easy to
consume both by libguestfs and by other software, without requiring deep
knowledge of the driver guts.  The packaging may use whatever extra
knowledge it wants to lay the drivers out in this structure, but driver
consumers (libguests and others) don't need to care.

Roman.