[Libguestfs] New tool proposal

[Richard W.M. Jones]

On Tue, May 22, 2012 at 04:54:23PM +0800, Wanlong Gao wrote:
> On 05/15/2012 04:41 PM, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> 
> > On Tue, May 15, 2012 at 04:13:27PM +0800, Wanlong Gao wrote:
> >> Hi Rich,
> >>
> >> We just talked about a new tool virt-diff which can diff files
> >> between two guest, suggested by Kamezawa Hiroyuki <kamezawa.hiroyu at jp.fujitsu.com>
> >>
> >> things like below,
> >> # virt-diff -Nru --guest=Guest0 --guest=Guest1 /etc/hosts
> >>
> >> Any thought about this?
> > 
> > Sure, sounds like a good idea.
> 
> 
> What do you think about how to implement the virt-diff ?
> particularly for the recursive option of diff?

It depends what you want it to do!  I'd definitely start with
at least some notes about exactly what you want it to do.  Files?
Filesystems?  Metadata?  Partitions?  Windows Regsitry?

Note that you can already do some sorts of file comparison using
'virt-ls', ie:

  virt-ls -lR --checksum -d guest1 / > files1
  virt-ls -lR --checksum -d guest2 / > files2
  diff -u files1 files2

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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