Re: [Libguestfs] Rethinking appliance building

On Sun, Dec 05, 2010 at 10:09:58AM -0700, Thomas S Hatch wrote: Yes please! This brings me to the second part of the email that I didn't write ... To support a new package manager, the package manager has to support some simple operations. (1) There has to be a way to detect that the package manager should be used, eg. by looking for /etc/arch-release (2) There must be a way to take a list of package names, and fully resolve all dependencies (recursively as necessary) to get a complete list of packages that must be installed to bootstrap. (3) Must be a way to download a package. (4) Must be able to list out the files in a downloaded package. (5) Must be able to extract a single file from a downloaded package. (1)-(5) have to work as non-root. You can use the RPM and Debian plugins for comparison: http://git.annexia.org/?p=febootstrap.git;a=blob;f=febootstrap_debian.ml;... http://git.annexia.org/?p=febootstrap.git;a=blob;f=febootstrap_yum_rpm.ml... The precise API is described here: http://git.annexia.org/?p=febootstrap.git;a=blob;f=febootstrap_package_ha... The git repo is down at the moment, but the contents of the tarball are identical to git right now. Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones virt-df lists disk usage of guests without needing to install any software inside the virtual machine. Supports Linux and Windows. http://et.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-df/