[fedora-virt] libguestfs broken dependencies on Fedora 10

[Ján ONDREJ (SAL)]

On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 09:15:41PM +0100, Richard W.M. Jones wrote:
> On Mon, May 18, 2009 at 07:19:28PM +0200, Ján ONDREJ (SAL) wrote:
> >   during reading FWN I see, that not only I don't like broken dependencies
> > in Fedora repositories. I have an suggestion, how to fix this and make it
> > functional for Fedora 10.
> > 
> >   Richard, can you add qemu-0.10 (at least binary) into libguestfs package
> > for Fedora 10? Please change you spec file, add qemu sources, compile
> > qemu-kvm as alternate name, like qemu-kvm-libguestfs and configure your
> > libguestfs to use this version of qemu/kvm.
> 
> This is certainly one way to do it.  Bundling a whole qemu binary is
> arguably as bad as breaking dependencies isn't it?

I think it's less disturbing for user, but may be harder for packager.
Another way can be to add only binary to libguestfs sources, but it's not an
opensource way.

> I also had a go at backporting the changes to qemu that we ship in
> F-10.  qemu in F-10 is based on qemu 0.9, and doesn't include the
> vmchannel patch.  The vmchannel patch looks deceptively simple:
> 
> http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/qemu-devel/2009-02/msg01042.html
> 
> However when I started to backport it, I discovered that the patch
> depends on many extra functions and features added to slirp since
> qemu 0.9.  I ended up with a qemu which compiled, but kept
> segfaulting, and it was tricky to diagnose exactly why.

Hmm, even if I don't use KVM in Fedora 10 for production, may be somebody
uses, so playing with this package in a stable system is not a good idea.

Backporting changes to qemu-0.9 may be the right way, just we can pray to
not end with totally non-functional qemu (like your segfaulting).

> Is it really a problem to use the libguestfs and/or qemu packages from
> Fedora 11 builds?  You can grab the latest builds out of Koji:
> 
> http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/search?match=glob&type=package&terms=libguestfs
> http://koji.fedoraproject.org/koji/search?match=glob&type=package&terms=qemu
> 
> This worked OK for me, although I have now moved to using Fedora
> 11-Preview, and have mostly abandoned Fedora 10.

There are still problems with qemu-0.10 on some systems. Look at least for
my bugs 499601 or 499596. I also can't install 11-Preview on qemu-0.10 with
in graphics mode.
Also set proper automatic updates for these packages (each user should
update at least their qemu packages) can be harder.

		SAL