[Pkg-libvirt-maintainers] Bug#681889: libguestfs0 has too many dependencies?

[Richard W.M. Jones]

To: Thomas Koch:

> I was forced to install vim! This is insulting for an emacs user!

guestfish needs vim to implement the 'vi' command:
http://libguestfs.org/guestfish.1.html#vi
(and emacs to implement the 'emacs' command).  I don't know why
libguestfs0 would depend on this however.

> Seriously. The dependency list of libguestfs0 is very
> surprising. Could you please check whether libguestfs0 could be split
> up in smaller binary packages with only minimal dependencies? If that
> shouldn't be possible (how?), could you please add a short explanation
> of the dependencies in the package description and a longer one in a
> README.Debian?

This is a pretty common question, and therefore I have added the
following section to the FAQ

http://libguestfs.org/guestfs-faq.1.html#libguestfs-has-a-really-long-list-of-dependencies-
section: "Libguestfs has a really long list of dependencies"

It would be possible to package libguestfs for Debian differently, and
although I doubt that you'd be happier with the results, let me know
if any of the alternatives suggested in that section are better for
you.  One thing which is unfortunately *not* possible at this time is
to split libguestfs up into different capabilities, eg.  enabling only
XFS or NTFS by installing a particular subpackage.

Having said that, in the Debian package right now there are probably
dependencies which are not needed.  In particular I don't think that
the appliance dependencies are needed on the main package.

To: Laurent Bigonville:

> I might be wrong here, but isn't libguestfs running all the commands
> into an appliance? Shouldn't all these dependencies installed only
> inside the appliance? Or is there a "mode" where libguestfs can run
> commands on the host?

Not quite either of these.  Libguestfs builds an appliance using files
from the host (eg. /sbin/mkfs), then runs these commands in the
appliance only, never on the host.  It therefore needs them to be
present on the host, so it can copy them into the appliance to run
them.

The supermin man page explains all this, see:

http://libguestfs.org/supermin.8.html#SUPERMIN-APPLIANCES

(Note that supermin was previously called febootstrap; it's the same
thing)

 - - -

I hope this at least explains some of what's going on, even if it
doesn't help much :-(

Rich.

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