[xen-tools-dev] Status

[Nathan O'Sullivan]

> Anyway I'm largely repeating myself, but if anyone is willing to work on
> rinse and believes that this is worth their time, then by all means, I
> have no problem with that either.
>
> On the one hand I hate jumping ship, on the other hand, it's an arduous
> way to go, rinse that is.
>
>    
I've put 3-4 hours into rinse and  xen-tools getting Fedora 13 going. 
Rinse certainly has its issues but on the plus side it exists, and its 
easy to work with.

I've also committed some changes yesterday to support OpenSUSE 11.2 
along with the xen-tools hook directory.  I guess one potential issue 
with Kickstart is it seems Suse do not support it, and instead have 
something called "AutoYaST" instead.


For those who aren't familiar with Rinse - its main problem is it 
downloads and extracts a bunch of packages (from a list stored in a 
rinse configuration) directly via rpm, which has two impacts:
- the yum database is unaware that any packages have been installed, and
- this download-and-extract process doesn't respect dependencies known 
by yum either.

Due to the dependency issue, each new OS release you have to update the 
package list with maybe 5 new packages, to add any new library 
dependencies of yum itself.

The badness here is that you can/will end up with some packages that are 
on-disk, but not known by yum to be "installed", so "yum update" will 
not install new versions as they're released. This can be worked around 
to some degree by installing a few common packages with yum (such as yum 
itself), which will trigger quite large dependency chains and pull in a 
good hundred or so basic packages.


I think both these issues could be mitigated, but for my purposes they 
really aren't that serious.



Regards
Nathan