[libvirt] libvirt and the lowest common denominator

[John Levon]

On Mon, Feb 09, 2009 at 04:03:31PM +0000, Mark McLoughlin wrote:

> > 3. The Sun repository *is* the upstream for xend on Solaris for a number
> >    of reasons:
> > 
> > a. The 3.1.x series is only maintained by us, there is no other 3.1 upstream
> > 
> > b. The XenSource upstream does not, and cannot, work on Solaris
> > 
> > c. XenSource have no interest in xend at all and it's effectively
> >    unmaintained (with the exception of Novell I think).
> ...
> > 7. Any change that involves *incompatibility* is clearly different, and
> > IMHO not acceptable.
> 
> As a thought experiment - if upstream did gain the ability to work on
> Solaris, but it worked differently to Sun's version ... how would that
> be resolved in libvirt?

Are you talking about incompatible differences, or compatible ones?

If it was incompatible, the only correct choice for libvirt project is
to follow the community version.

If it's compatible, then IMHO it's a case by case issue. The project
would definitely follow the upstream version at least, but certain cases
could support the Sun version too.

> Perhaps what you want is for libvirt to take the view that Sun's version
> of Xen is an incompatible fork and handle it differently, as if it was
> supporting a completely different virt platform?

I would hope this isn't necessary. We've not yet had to deal with a case
where there is one of these incompatible differences, and I personally
don't intend to let it happen. This was in fact one of the main reasons
for the big effort to merge up our libvirt changes!

regards
john