[Thincrust-devel] issues with zip packaging for appliances

David Huff dhuff at redhat.com
Thu Nov 6 15:36:18 UTC 2008


Perry Myers wrote:
>>>>> So the fundamental question here is... what packaging format can we 
>>>>> use that will have good compression, is natively supported on a 
>>>>> wide variety of platforms (Unix, Windows, Linux) and will hold raw 
>>>>> images that are fairly large.
>>>>
>>>> Well for Linux world ZIP, tar.gz, tar.bz2 are commonly installed. You
>>>> won't find things like 7-zip in many commercial distros - eg RHEL.
>>>>
>>>> For Windows world, ZIP is obviously standard natively done by Explorer,
>>>> but WinZIP supports tar.gz too.
>>>> Not sure what coverage of zip64 is like in Windows ?
>>>
>>> Perhaps what we need to do is just use tar.gz file and require that 
>>> Windows users grab 7-zip or WinZIP in order to extract.
>>
>> I think this is fine. If the user is comfortable with installing 
>> virtual appliances into a hypervisor I believe they will be able to 
>> handle this requirement.
> 
> David, can you quickly put in support for tar.gz and tar.bz2 as output 
> formats in addition to zip?  Right now appliance tools only supports zip.
>

I will add tar.ga and .bz2 as packaging options however looking at the 
ovf standard, they specify tar as a package format however do not 
specify compression:

"
An OVF package can be stored as a single file using the TAR format. The 
extension of that file should be
.ova (open virtual appliance or application).

The TAR format used shall comply with the USTAR (Uniform Standard Tape 
Archive) format as defined
by the POSIX IEEE 1003.1 standards group.
"

comments....
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