On Fri, Jun 03, 2011 at 11:38:45AM -0700, Sean McAfee wrote:
> Each version of febootstrap I've tried leads to a slightly different
> explosion of dependencies, each with its own idiosyncracies to be
> addressed.

Let's keep this thread on the list, since it may help others in future.

When you say dependencies of febootstrap, do you really mean of
febootstrap itself, or of the package list that libguestfs is trying
to download and install?  If the latter, you can reduce that by
removing things from appliance/packagelist.in in the libguestfs
sources.