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

[Richard W.M. Jones]

Since I wrote the message #26 above, we've done a lot of work upstream
and -- starting with libguestfs >= 1.26 and supermin >= 5 -- it will
be possible to split the dependencies of the appliance.

The basic ideas are covered in these blog posts:

http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/02/26/new-in-libguestfs-1-25-38/#content
http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/03/08/supermin-version-5/#content
http://rwmj.wordpress.com/2014/03/20/analysis-of-the-size-of-libguestfs-dependencies/#content

The Fedora Rawhide package has already been split into:

- libguestfs-gfs2
- libguestfs-hfsplus
- libguestfs-jfs
- libguestfs-nilfs
- libguestfs-reiserfs
- libguestfs-rescue   # vim dependency isolated here
- libguestfs-rsync
- libguestfs-xfs
- libguestfs-zfs      # zfs dependency isolated here

The idea is that you install libguestfs base package.  If you need to
handle guests / disk images using (eg) XFS, then you have to install
libguestfs-xfs as well.  The base package doesn't pull in some of the
larger / troublesome dependencies, so you only need to install those
if you need the feature.

I also posted a patch to the Debian package which begins implementing
this split (only ZFS so far, but the principle is the same for all
subpackages):

https://www.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2014-March/msg00171.html

Note this does require the new upstream versions of libguestfs &
supermin.  libguestfs 1.26 should be released at the end of this
month, but there are 1.25.x packages in Debian experimental.

Rich.

-- 
Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones
Read my programming blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com
Fedora now supports 80 OCaml packages (the OPEN alternative to F#)