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Date: Thu, 13 Aug 2009 17:57:04 -0500
From: Anthony Liguori <anthony@codemonkey.ws>
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Subject: Re: [Qemu-devel] [PATCH] Add tar container format
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To: Alexander Graf <agraf@suse.de>
Cc: Kevin Wolf <kwolf@redhat.com>, qemu-devel@nongnu.org, Christoph Hellwig <hch@lst.de>

Alexander Graf wrote:
> For that we still need to enable the qemu blockery to support stacking though.
>
> Signed-off-by: Alexander Graf <agraf@suse.de>
>   

This feels like a bit too much of a one-off to me.  I'm concerned that 
it's something we'd have to support long term that wouldn't have very 
many users beyond your particular use-case.

So far, we only support image formats that are dedicated to virtual 
machines.  We support http and nbd but those are generic protocols, not 
necessarily special formats.  tar and dzip seem arbitrary.  Why not zip, 
rar, bzip2, or any other format?

You could do all of this by making use of a fuse filesystem.

I'd almost rather see something like gio integration so that this sort 
of generic filesystem stuff could live somewhere else.  I'm curious what 
others think though.  Does it seem reasonable to include this type of 
functionality?