[Libguestfs] Plan for nbdkit 1.8

Richard W.M. Jones rjones at redhat.com
Tue Nov 6 23:05:04 UTC 2018


I would really like to release a new stable nbdkit (1.8) soon.

The reasons are not only because of the many great new features (which
I summarise below) but also a few practical reasons:

- Dropping mandatory [key=].. (ie. "magic config key") for many plugin
  parameters makes nbdkit much easier to use and easier to describe to
  potential users.

- Demonstrated utility of log filter and error filter for testing and
  visualizing block devices.
  (https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2018/11/06/nbd-graphical-viewer-raid-5-edition/)

- Lots of attention to limits / large virtual sizes (eg
  https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2018/09/05/nbdkit-for-loopback-pt-5-8-exabyte-btrfs-filesystem/)

I hope to give a FOSDEM talk next year and it would be nice to have a
stable set of features available in most distros.  If we release 1.8
soon then it could become the baseline next February.

	----

The release notes would look something like this [preliminary!]:

- Magic config key allows simpler invocation of many plugins, eg:
    nbdkit file file=foo
  becomes:
    nbdkit file foo

- New plugin: 'sh' for running shell scripts and other external programs.
  (https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2018/09/09/write-nbdkit-plugins-in-shell-script/)

- New plugin: 'partitioning' which creates a partitioned disk from a
  list of partitions in files.

- New plugin: 'iso' which creates an ISO (CD-ROM) image on the fly
  from a directory of files.
  (https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2018/10/18/new-in-nbdkit-create-an-iso-image-on-the-fly/)

- New plugin: 'floppy' which creates a virtual FAT-formatted floppy
  disk from a directory of files.
  (https://rwmj.wordpress.com/2018/10/29/new-in-nbdkit-create-a-virtual-floppy-disk/)

- data: Add disk2data.pl script to generate data parameters.

- data: Use <file to inline a file.

- vddk: Use '-D vddk.diskinfo=1' to enable extra debug information.

- tests: Use a helper function to refactor and simplify most tests.

- partition filter: Can handle > 128 GPT partitions.

- nbdkit can be compiled on the Haiku operating system
  (François Revol).

	----

Anyhow, if there's something you'd like to get into nbdkit 1.8 and/or
you strongly object to any of the above, please follow up.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
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