[xen-tools] Re: Outstanding bugs/requests for 3.0?

[Henning Sprang]

On 11/27/06, Steve Kemp <steve at steve.org.uk> wrote:
>
>   So .. a quick call for comments;
>
>     * Is there anything (simple!) you'd like to see added to the next
>       release?

I think it's not simple, but maybe you have an idea to make it simple:

Since a while am thinking that I need something like "simple presets"
to recreate a vm for some host again in an easy and fast manner, by
only entering the hostname.

Currently, I save some commands like

xen-create-image --hostname=mytestmachine --mac=MAC --dist=sarge --size=10GB

in one-line shell scripts and run them, from a usability point of view
it would be somehow consistent to have something making it possible to
just say

xen-create-image --hostname=mytestmachine

Maybe for the config I can script the templates (I guess that the
template language is scriptable in a usable way, but am not sure at
the moment).
Maybe I can just create an extra config for each domain and use it with -c?
But then I have a lot redundancy in all my config files, so what would
be needed would be a possibility to include a generic config file and
kind of "overload" it with the diffs that are needed for a specific
vm.

Sorry for not putting this into the BTS already - iut's probably too late...


>     * Are there any outstanding bugs/issues which I've missed or not
>       fixed correctly?

I've not had enough time to check it all intensively. Most issues I
posted seem to be fixed.

Hmm, you are right, the correct error handling that I thought was done
seems to have some bugs, sometime this week I had a failed vm creation
transaction that ended up with an lvm volume created but no vm config
file, so the volume had to be deleted manually.
(maybe in my fedory test, so not that important for now - i'll get
back at this later).

And one usability thing that's probably really easy: on one hand, it's
nice to have less typing when deleting domains with xen-delete-imags
HOSTNAME, on the other hand, it's not consistent with the creation
syntax. I'd kind of expect the delete program take the same argument
to destroy the image as the creation program.

And one interesting thing might be to have the correct kernel version
in the default config file when installing. Unfortunately, the Debian
Xen kernels don't come with the simplyfied Kernel Symlinks as the
XenSource version does (vmlinuz-2.6) - maybe it's worth a wishlist bug
against the xen kernel package?

Hopefully this mail is understandable as it's late and written in a hurry...

Henning