open-vm-tools for Fedora

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Oct 15, 2008 at 11:13:22AM +0200, Dario Lesca wrote:
> Why Fedora not have in our standard repo the open-vm-tools package?
> 
> http://open-vm-tools.sourceforge.net/
> 
> > linux-0chi:~ # rpm -qi open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-21.1
> > Name        : open-vm-tools                Relocations: (not relocatable)
> > Version     : 2008.04.14                        Vendor: SUSE LINUX Products GmbH, Nuernberg, Germany
> > ....
> > Group       : System/Emulators/PC           Source RPM: open-vm-tools-2008.04.14-21.1.src.rpm
> > Size        : 1495998                          License: BSD 3-Clause; GPL v2 only; LGPL v2.1 only
> > ....
> > Summary     : Open Virtual Machine Tools
> > Description :
> > Open Virtual Machine Tools (open-vm-tools) are the open source
> > implementation of VMware Tools.
> 
> It's a License Problem?

As you can see from text you quoted the License(s) are all open source
and allowed by Fedora. A quick look at the code and it seems these
license tags are accurate too.

The open-vm-tools contains a mixture of userspace libraries/agents, and
a bunch of kernel modules. The kernel modules will not be allowed in 
Fedora as per packaging standards. Anyone is free to package up the
userspace tools. 

Despite their generic sounding name they are really only useful for
VMWare because the host<->guest communication protocl is utter
crackrock, relying on poking a special (potentially unsafe) IO port,
and not portable to non-x86 architectures.

Furthermore 'vm tools' as a concept really shouldn't need to even exist.
Each bit of functionality should be integrated into the appropriate 
existing application or tool, so things 'just work' in a VM without 
needing install of special packages. eg mouse / video drivers are already
part of Xorg as standard. The hgfs mount helper program should just be 
part of util-lnux; monitoring extensions added to existing monitoring 
tools like collectd or nagios. Don't let that stop you packaging it up
if you want it in Fedora though.

Daniel
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