[fedora-virt] libguestfs under Debian / Ubuntu

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 12:37:11PM +0200, Emre Erenoglu wrote:
> On Fri, Jun 12, 2009 at 12:29 PM, Daniel P. Berrange <berrange at redhat.com>wrote:
> 
> >
> > Providing pre-built binary OS images gets you into potentially complicated
> > license compliance issues. You as distributor of the binary have to comply
> > with the license of every single piece of software that went into the
> > binary. For the Fedora Project distributing a binary image of a Fedora
> > distro, compliance is easy because Fedora already ships all source RPMs.
> > If a non-Fedora entity wants to ships binaries of Fedora it needs to make
> > sure it can provide the corresponding source. It is not clearcut that it
> > can rely on Fedora to always ship the sources for it.  The safe option is
> > to always build from source and distribute everything you used to build
> > yourself. This is actually an argument *for* Debian using debootstrap
> > against a Debian repo, rather Debian using feboiotstrap+YUM + Fedora repos.
> >
> 
> I see the situation. This binary distro download may also create a licensing
> problem for our Pardus distro. I guess this leaves the following options:
> 1- package yum and febootstrap for Pardus and use them
> 2- create a "pabootstrap" package compatible with febootstrap and build a
> Pardus appliance instead of fedora appliance
> 3- create a pre-cooked "compatible" pardus appliance image and use this one
> 
> For the last option, does it make any difference which distro is inside the
> appliance? Is there anything specific to Fedora? say, if we support all
> possible file system drivers as well as raid/lvm, would it still be needed
> to have Fedora inside? Is there a requirements documents for this appliance?

Check out Richard's architecture diagram

http://libguestfs.org/guestfs.3.html#state_machine_and_low_level_event_api

AFAIK, the only critical thing for the appliance is that it runs the 
custom guestfsd daemon talking to over QMEMU's vmchannel device. If
you get that setup correctly then the choice of distro really shouldn't
make any real difference. It is mostly just a tools problem to build
yourself a image with the right pieces present.

Daniel
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