[libvirt] Ten years of libvirt

Tue Nov 3 09:45:49 UTC 2015

As a libvirt newbie, great to read the historic story. 10 years, sounds 
so cool, honor to be here as a contributor:)

On 11/02/2015 06:04 PM, Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 02, 2015 at 09:57:24AM +0100, Michal Privoznik wrote:
>> Dear list,
>>
>> join me on this big day in congratulations to libvirt that has just
>> turned 10 and is starting new decade of its life. At the same time big
>> thanks to all who contributed in any way.
>
> Yes, this is a great milestone for the project. Here is a quick look at
> what the last 10 years has achieved...
>
> For the first month of existance the project was actually called libxen[1],
> but on Dec 5[2], Daniel renamed it to libvir, and then further to libvirt
> on Feb 9 2006[3].
>
> We had our second contributor on Dec 7 2005[4], Karel Zak, also of Red Hat.
> Our third contributor, Anthony Liguori, was also our first non-Red Hat
> contributor on Jan 11 2006[5]. Since then it looks like[6] the core libvirt.git
> repository has had a total of 515 different contributors from countless
> different companies. We have about another 30 git repositories hosted on
> libvirt.org with contributions from many more, not to mention an unknown
> number of 3rd party projects...
>
> The library only supported Xen for the first year of its existence, but
> on Feb 14 2007[7] our initial QEMU driver was added. Fast forward to today
> and we have many different drivers, Hyper-V, VMWare ESX, OpenVZ, LXC,
> Parallels, Power-Hypervisor, QEMU, BHyve, Xen / libxl, User Mode Linux,
> Xen API, VirtualBox, VMWare Desktop/GSX and our dummy test driver and
> our remote RPC driver. This covers pretty much every important hypervisor
> that exists today.
>
> The python language bindings were the first non-C language we supported
> in Dec 2005[8], but since then we gained many other bindings including
> Perl, Java, Ruby, PHP, OCaml, as well as bindings to other object
> models such as GObject, SNMP, and CIM.
>
> We added support for translation in Sep 2006[9], and now have translation
> files covering 63 different languages, largely thanks to the help of the
> Fedora translation teams, first via Transifex and now via Zanata.
>
> Aside from virsh which has been around since the start, the first 3rd
> party application built with libvirt was xenguest-install which used
> the libvirt APIs to provision Fedora/RHEL guests on Xen. This was initially
> part of Fedora Xen RPMs, but in Aug 2006 it moved into its own project
> becoming the virt-install tool[10] everyone knows. The first graphical
> user interface, virt-manager, has been around since Mar 2006 [11]. Since
> that since, libvirt has found use in a wide variety of places whether as
> a plugin to tools like Vagrant and Nagios, are in large scale data center
> management apps like oVirt or the cloud platform OpenStack.
>
> It is not all about code development either. We have had many contributors
> in other important areas of the project. Many people have made presentations
> about the project at various open source conferences and user meetups
> worldwide which help to spread knowledge & build interest & enthusiasm
> around the project. We've had many contributors to our documentation too,
> most recently creating a brand new python development guide[10], but also
> work on our in-tree docs, and wiki pages. Countless users have written
> blog postings about the project which have helped our community of users
> to learn about the many neat features libvirt provides. When we started the
> libvirt-users mailing list, we weren't sure how it would work out, but 5
> years later it is great to see a sustained high level of activity on the
> users mailing list, which a wide variety of people helping each other out.
>
> You might think that after 10 years of development, we'd be slowing down,
> but anyone who follows the development list and/or git history will see
> we're developing as fast as ever. It seems we're no where near "done"....
>
>      http://dilbert.com/strip/2008-02-12
>
> A big thankyou to all who have contributed to making libvirt a successful
> project, whether by deploying it, writing applications using it, writing
> documentation, blog posting, providing end user support, developing new
> features, translating the code, providing presentations / talks and much
> more that I can't remember off hand...
>
> I look forward to seeing what another 10 years of hard work will bring to
> the project.
>
> Regards,
> Daniel
>
> [1] Initially libxen
>      http://libvirt.org/git/?p=libvirt.git;a=commit;h=d77e1a9642fe1efe9aa5f737a640354c27d04e02
>
> [2] Renamed libvir
>      http://libvirt.org/git/?p=libvirt.git;a=commit;h=1192a2ade33bccb54e68daaba60043be995a59e1
>
> [3] Renamed libvirt
>      http://libvirt.org/git/?p=libvirt.git;a=commit;h=8c423e6c83406efd85257cab65cfa121f7997a1b
>
> [4] Second contributor
>      http://libvirt.org/git/?p=libvirt.git;a=commit;h=d5f9611f4a53ad68bfb88c02384ef40fb9454775
>
> [5] First non-Red Hat contributor
>      http://libvirt.org/git/?p=libvirt.git;a=commit;h=f18b6c0ec68f150e94eec60a1f2f980ae5865600
>
> [6] Counting total contributors is an inexact science, since when we used
>      CVS instead of GIT, attribution was not tracked very well.
>
> [7] QEMU driver
>      http://libvirt.org/git/?p=libvirt.git;a=commit;h=23ad665cb05ef9ce7d298cc34bff5efb95ef6948
>
> [8] Python binding
>      http://libvirt.org/git/?p=libvirt.git;a=commit;h=75169488a046c6fcd8c9eb20dfe9ca3bb30faeaa
>
> [9] Translation support
>      http://libvirt.org/git/?p=libvirt.git;a=commit;h=e8e58440891d7132313f38fb64766c0502307e6b
>
> [10] virt-install created
>
>      https://git.fedorahosted.org/cgit/python-virtinst.git/commit/?id=1e2e1aa0ca0b5ed8669be61aa4271a3e8c1d7333
>
> [11] virt-manager created
>
>       https://github.com/virt-manager/virt-manager/commit/3ed0ef34589a49b32db8601a1b784dbbfe7d92c8
>
> [12] Python appdev guide
>       http://libvirt.org/git/?p=libvirt-appdev-guide-python.git;a=summary
>

-- 
Yours Sincerely,

Cao Jin