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 virt-df lists disk usage of guests without needing to install any software inside the virtual machine. Supports Linux and Windows. http://people.redhat.com/~rjones/virt-df/ -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to [email protected] with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact [email protected]
