Re: [Libguestfs] New tool proposal

On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 04:45:22PM +0800, Wanlong Gao wrote: [...] virt-ls can find the differences if you use the --checksum option, because this computes a checksum over the whole file content. If its just the file date which has changed, it's cheaper to use the --times option. http://libguestfs.org/virt-ls.1.html#checksum http://libguestfs.org/virt-ls.1.html#recursive_long_listing It sounds useful, but I think you could still implement this on top of virt-ls. The problem with adding 'diff' as an operation to the daemon is that you would need to attach the disks from multiple guests to a single appliance. This is in general problematic, although we do it in some limited cases: http://libguestfs.org/guestfs-performance.1.html#reducing_the_number_of_t... If you wanted to write a separate virt-diff tool, it's probably a good idea to start with the source of virt-ls and work from there. That program already knows how to iterate over the filesystem (of a single guest), and you could build diff functionality on top of that: https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/blob/0e05e9f6ce696cf2a5172eda3fe... Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com Fedora now supports 80 OCaml packages (the OPEN alternative to F#) http://cocan.org/getting_started_with_ocaml_on_red_hat_and_fedora