Has an rsync addition to libguestfs been considered? It would be great to have when copying the contents of a filesystem to a disk of a different filesystem. It could also be used to keep portions of cloned machines in sync. For example, I'm porting VirtualBox images to Xen. I sometimes make change to the source image that I would like to easily propagate to the Xen copy. DD is sometimes a bit too low-level.

On Tue, 2011-05-24 at 22:12 +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote: > On Tue, May 24, 2011 at 12:59:50PM -0700, Chris Willmore wrote: > > Has an rsync addition to libguestfs been considered? It would be > > great to have when copying the contents of a filesystem to a disk of > > a different filesystem. It could also be used to keep portions of > > cloned machines in sync. For example, I'm porting VirtualBox images > > to Xen. I sometimes make change to the source image that I would > > like to easily propagate to the Xen copy. DD is sometimes a bit too > > low-level. > > I think this makes sense. As a matter of getting changes in > libguestfs it's better to propose patches and APIs. You could test > this out by adding rsync to appliance/packagelist.in, and then adding > some APIs to libguestfs (see [0] and example [1]). Post the patches > here and we can review them. Can I put in a vote for rsync as well? I think it would be a very useful addition to guestfs. I'm not sure how a streaming network protocol like rsync is going to fit in to guestfs's command/response protocol though. A generic method for forwarding TCP to qemu (host? guest? what's it called?) might be good, and also allow other commands that are implemented over a TCP/IP transport to be added as well.