[Thincrust-devel] packaging of sparse raw disk images

[Perry Myers]

In the latest appliance-tools you can use .tar.bz2 among other formats for 
packaging up your appliances.

I've tried building appliances with sparse raw disks and a disk that 
should have been empty ends up being non sparse (and 20GB of zeros) after 
extracting from the tar.bz2.

Doing a stupid sanity check, I did the following:
qemu-img create -f raw foo.img 100M
tar -cvf foo.tar foo.img
tar -xvf foo.tar

And the image is non-sparse.

This really doesn't affect the distribution of appliances, since whether 
the image is non-sparse and compressed via gz/bz2 or qcow compress doesn't 
matter.  In the end the difference in archive size will be negligible.

Just wanted to point this out...

Perry

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