Re: 3.0.3 freeze

["Daniel P. Berrange" <berrange@redhat.com>]

On Mon, Aug 28, 2006 at 05:48:56PM +0100, Ian Pratt wrote:
> > > All bug fixing is going on in the unstable tree: there has been no 
> > > fork. I'm now done with major refactorings (domctl/sysctl 
> > on Friday; 
> > > shadow2->shadow today). I wanted those in before 3.0.3 because, 
> > > although large, they are unlikely to break anything,
> > 
> >   Huh ? libvirt uses dom0 syscalls. And libvirt uses its own 
> > code to do it since the existing libraries for dom0 calls are 
> > GPL'ed which would not be compatible with libvirt own 
> > licencing (LGPL). The headers used by libvirt are simply 
> > removed, the ioctl entry points are changed, etc ... You 
> > really expected that to 'not break anything' ?
> 
> We were only thinking in terms of the internal consistency of the tree
> and the public APIs and libraries -- I didn't realise libvirt was going
> directly at the dom0_op ABI rather than using the libxenguest or
> libxenctrl libraries.
> 
> If your reason for doing this was just the GPL'ness of the libraries
> then I assume you'd support the email I posted a few weeks ago
> suggesting we try to change the library license to LGPL? Would you then
> start using the libraries?

I don't think the libraries match our use case since they only ever
support the current version of the HV api. libvirt meanwhile supports
*all* historic versions of the HV that it needs. So if someone upgrades
libvirt to a newer release, but doesn't upgrade their HV, their management
layer keeps working reliably - libvirt checks the HV version at runtime and
decides the calls to use. So if we switched to the libraries we'd loose
this compatability with different HV versions

Regards,
Dan
-- 
|=- Red Hat, Engineering, Emerging Technologies, Boston.  +1 978 392 2496 -=|
|=-           Perl modules: http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/              -=|
|=-               Projects: http://freshmeat.net/~danielpb/               -=|
|=-  GnuPG: 7D3B9505   F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505  -=|