[Pkg-libvirt-maintainers] Bug#699703: libguestfs0: make febootstrap a recommends

[Richard W.M. Jones]

There seems to be some confusion and misunderstanding in this bug
report.

First the facts:

(1) febootstrap is a general tool to build supermin appliances.  It
has nothing to do with 'Fedora' -- the name is just an unfortunate
historical accident.

(2) On Fedora we split out 'febootstrap' (the part for building
supermin appliances from repositories) and
'febootstrap-supermin-helper' (the part for reconstructing supermin
appliances at runtime) as separate packages.

(3) On Fedora, libguestfs only depends at runtime on
febootstrap-supermin-helper which is a small C program that takes next
to no space.  febootstrap is a build-time requirement only.

(4) If you are using supermin appliances, then
febootstrap-supermin-helper is very much required, even on Debian.

(5) If you are using fixed appliances, then
febootstrap-supermin-helper is not involved.
https://github.com/libguestfs/libguestfs/blob/master/src/appliance.c#L66

Second some observations arising:

(a) AFAIK Debian is still using the supermin appliance by default,
although it does build it in a slightly different way from how we do
it in Fedora.  Nevertheless, febootstrap-supermin-helper is required
by Debian (see points (4), (5)).

(b) Because Debian builds the supermin appliance from the repository
at package installation time, febootstrap is also required.

(c) Individual users may decide to switch to using the fixed appliance
for performance reasons or whatever, but that doesn't mean that
febootstrap can be made an optional package for all Debian users.  I
understand that 'Recommends' does not necessarily mean that the
package won't be installed, but I still think there is scope here for
an ordinary Debian user to break their libguestfs installation by
uninstalling febootstrap, and in any case there is no real reason to
uninstall febootstrap (see the next point).

(d) I don't understand why you wouldn't want febootstrap on your
"institute[']s systems".  It's a perfectly decent, fully free and
interesting tool which takes a unique and innovative approach to the
problem of packaging enormous virtual machines.  It works on Debian
and a variety of other distros.
http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2009/10/22/supermin-appliance-now-in-febootstrap/

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
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