This patch is FYI as it needs more testing, although feel free to take a look at it if you want. Background: We'd like to change libguestfs so that the appliance can support optional features. This would mean you could have (for example) a 'libguestfs' base package and a 'libguestfs-xfs' package providing optional support for XFS filesystem tools. This would only apply to the supermin case. Currently the supermin appliance is built out of 3 files: $ ls -1 /usr/lib64/guestfs/ initramfs.fedora-12.x86_64.supermin.hostfiles # text file containing wildcards of files picked up from # the host at runtime initramfs.fedora-12.x86_64.supermin.img # base appliance data (cpio file) kmod.whitelist # text file containing wildcards matching kernel modules There are a number of problems with this: (1) The files have fixed names. (2) The names are rather obscure. (3) You can't have optional appliance modules. The idea would be to replace this with a scheme where the supermin builder looks in a directory and picks out all the files it needs from there. It would look something like: $ ls -1 /usr/lib64/guestfs/supermin.d/ base.img hostfiles optional-xfs.img # installed by libguestfs-xfs package optional-zfs.img # installed by libguestfs-zfs package (Similarly the kernel module whitelist could point to a directory, but we don't need that now and aren't implementing that right away). At the same time we have for a while been maintaining some significant duplicate functionality in febootstrap, cf: http://git.annexia.org/?p=libguestfs.git;a=blob;f=appliance/supermin-spli... http://git.annexia.org/?p=febootstrap.git;a=blob;f=febootstrap-to-supermi... and: http://git.annexia.org/?p=libguestfs.git;a=blob;f=appliance/libguestfs-su... http://git.annexia.org/?p=febootstrap.git;a=blob;f=febootstrap-supermin-h... Since this is a major change to the way the appliance is built, it makes sense at the same time to fold everything into febootstrap and drop the custom libguestfs/appliance/*supermin* scripts. This patch is the first part of this plan, porting the relevant functionality from libguestfs into febootstrap. Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones New in Fedora 11: Fedora Windows cross-compiler. Compile Windows programs, test, and build Windows installers. Over 70 libraries supprt'd http://fedoraproject.org/wiki/MinGW http://www.annexia.org/fedora_mingw