This works, but there's no time saving and I'm still investigating
whether it does what I think it does. Nevertheless I thought I would
post it because it (probably) implements the idea I had last night
outlined in:
https://www.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2019-June/msg00010.html
The meat of the change is patch 4. Patch 5 is an example which I
would probably fold into patch 4 for submission. The others are
non-controversial documentation and refactorings to prepare for the
change.
Rich.