[Libguestfs] Building from source with custom gperf location

[Lewis Gaul]

I finally have it working! I should have thought of using yumdownloader
myself - thanks for that. The other missing piece was needing a supermin
appliance binary (guestfs seemed to be trying to use /usr/bin/supermin5
which isn't present for me, and I couldn't work out how to get it to use
$PWD/usr/bin/supermin5).

Full steps I ended up using:

yumdownloader --resolve libguestfs libguestfs-tools-c
for rpm in *.rpm; do
    rpm2cpio "$rpm" | cpio -idmv
done
curl
https://download.libguestfs.org/binaries/appliance/appliance-1.40.1.tar.xz
-OL
tar -xf  appliance-1.40.1.tar.xz
LIBGUESTFS_PATH="$PWD/appliance" LD_LIBRARY_PATH="$PWD/usr/lib64"
./usr/bin/virt-cat -a centos7.qcow2 /root/.bashrc

>> Take a look at m4/guestfs-libraries.m4 and change the AC_CHECK_LIB to
PKG_CHECK_MODULES, following examples of other package tests in that file
> Do you have a patch for this one?

I've created https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/pull/66 with some
discussion on the two cases - feel free to edit/decline as you see fit.

Thanks,
Lewis

On Sun, 2 May 2021 at 14:49, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones at redhat.com> wrote:

> On Sun, May 02, 2021 at 02:23:55PM +0100, Lewis Gaul wrote:
> > Thanks, once again that seems to have got me past that problem,
>
> Do you have a patch for this one?
>
> > only
> > for a new one to crop up (this time hivex, which I'm not sure how to
> > build or why it's required on Linux). I take it this isn't really an
> > expected workflow, trying to get the package to build without being
> > able to use a package manager to install the dependencies?
>
> Hivex is needed to inspect and edit Windows registries, and is a
> required dependency nowadays.  It's also only a small C library and is
> available in most distros.
>
> > Searching the output from ./configure, I can't yet see any mention
> > of quite a few of the other dependencies listed
> > at https://libguestfs.org/ guestfs-building.1.html that may be
> > problematic, so I'm wondering if it's time to throw in the towel for
> > this approach.
> >
> > All I'm looking for really is a way to programmatically edit a
> > single file in a qcow2 VM image (which I planned to achieve with
> > virt-edit) - is there an easier way to do this? Does virt-edit alone
> > require all these dependencies, or would there be a way to build
> > just virt-edit without pulling apart the build system?
>
> > Alternatively, would it be possible/easier to build a static virt-edit
> binary
> > in a CentOS 7 VM that could simply be copied onto this RHEL 7 machine?
> >
> > I appreciate your help so far and any further suggestions you might have!
>
> RHEL 7 has libguestfs already.  You don't have root access, but it
> should be possible to download what you need as RPMs, unpack them, and
> run libguestfs from your home directory.  Something like this:
>
> $ yumdownloader libguestfs
> ...
> libguestfs-1.40.2-5.el7.x86_64.rpm                         | 2.4 MB   00:01
>
> $ yumdownloader libguestfs-tools-c
>
> $ rpm2cpio libguestfs-1.40.2-5.el7.x86_64.rpm | cpio -id
> $ rpm2cpio libguestfs-tools-c-1.40.2-5.el7.x86_64.rpm | cpio -id
>
> $ cd usr/bin/
> $ LIBGUESTFS_PATH=$PWD/../lib64/guestfs LD_LIBRARY_PATH=../lib64
> ./libguestfs-test-tool
>
> You might also need to download other dependencies as RPMs and unpack
> those in the same way (supermin, hivex, etc)
>
> Or ask for root to install the package(!)
>
> 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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> build Windows installers. Over 100 libraries supported.
> http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW
>
>
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