[Libguestfs] Roadmap for libguestfs 1.10 (next stable version)

It's been nearly 5 months since we last released a stable version of libguestfs, and so I'm trying to get everything ready for the next stable version. This will be called libguestfs 1.10, and there is already a fantastic array of new features, summarised in part here[1]. Bugs ---- If there are bugs that you think ought to be fixed before 1.10 is released, then you need to (a) file them (if not done already) and (b) put 1.10 in the Devel Whiteboard field. The current list of 1.10 bugs is empty[2]. Road map -------- (Refer to the road map[3]) * Continue with general reduction in use of Perl. Key to this was to rewrite the tools that are still written in Perl into some compiled language: - virt-edit: This tool remains written in Perl, and the code has in fact got more complicated. So I think we failed here. - virt-list-filesystems, virt-list-partitions: These tools are deprecated and have been replaced (since 1.8) with a new more powerful program written in C called virt-filesystems. - virt-tar: In 1.10, this tool will be deprecated and replaced by new (and more capable) tools virt-copy-in, virt-copy-out, virt-tar-in and virt-tar-out. So I think this was a success. - virt-make-fs: Still in Perl. I don't get a sense that this tool is being used very much (or maybe it "just works" so well that no one ever files bugs or complains about it ...) - virt-resize: Although this would benefit from being rewritten in a higher-level language with sane static typing like OCaml, the real problems are that it's very hard to resize VMs, hard to understand what goes wrong when we do it, and hard to test the tool. virt-resize is such a complex problem that it almost deserves to be a separate project in itself, like virt-v2v. - virt-win-reg: Needs to be in Perl because of hivex regedit deps. * Make 'guestfish --ro' be the default, and get users to use 'guestfish --rw' for write access. This is probably going to get delayed (again) to 1.12. The reason is that 'guestfish --rw' is still not prevalent enough for us to make read-only be the default, without causing a lot of user confusion. However in 1.10 we have at least introduced the configuration file. * Allow alternate methods to start the appliance, including through libvirt and by connecting to an existing appliance. This was originally planned for 1.8 but we didn't get patches in time. This is partially implemented; however I'm still waiting to get patches to make libvirt happen. * Deeper and wider support for progress messages. This is basically done. * Better handling of partitions, including MBR extended partitions (RHBZ#593511, RHBZ#602997, RHBZ#642821). We've sort of agreed that we're going to write MBR and GPT partitioning libraries, and ditch parted. However there's no work on this yet, and I'm not going to let it delay 1.10. Rich. [1] http://libguestfs.org/RELEASE-NOTES.txt [2] https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced&field0-... [3] http://libguestfs.org/ROADMAP.txt -- 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/