libxml2 is very commonly available on Linux distros and has also been
ported (and is widely available) on Mac OS X and Windows. Therefore
simply require libxml2, and remove a lot of conditional code.
Add a remote drive by doing:
guestfish -a ssh://example.com/path/to/disk.img
There are several different protocols supported, as explained in the
man page.
This affects all virt-* tools that use the common guestfish options
parsing code.
This adds helper C functions 'is_string_list' and 'is_device_list'
allowing these tests to be carried out in generic C code instead of as
specialized tests.
Instead of using the various 'TestOutput', 'TestOutputList' etc
macros, it makes better sense to let the tests contain fragments of C
code to perform the checks.
Several new macros are added:
- 'TestResult': This macro takes a C expression which is evaluated to
test the result of commands. For example to compare if a string
result has some value:
TestResult (* command sequence *), "STREQ (ret, \"abcd\")"
The variable "ret" contains the result from the last command in the
sequence. But also, variables "ret1", "ret2", etc contain the results
from the last but one command, the command before that, and so forth,
allowing much more flexible tests to be written.
- 'TestResultTrue', 'TestResultFalse': Wrappers that test the last
command for true/false.
It's simpler to use the glibc 'program_invocation_short_name(3)'
feature, and fall back to a generic solution. Also remove risky
assignments to argv[0].
These set or get the program name in the handle. Most programs
will never need to call this, since we set this, if possible,
using the glibc 'program_invocation_short_name(3)' feature.
- /usr/lib{,64}/gconv/*:
This is the iconv data, required for APIs like iconv_open to work. In
particular, the mtools 'mcopy' program fails completely if it cannot
use iconv. 'mcopy' is used by SYSLINUX to copy files to the disk.
The error you would have seen is:
Error converting to codepage 850 Invalid argument
Cannot initialize 'S:'
Bad target s:/ldlinux.sys
- /usr/bin/localedef and /usr/sbin/build-locale-archive:
These are not really needed, but both are simply small binaries so we
might as well not delete them.
Setting the 'sparse' optional boolean causes writes to be omitted if
the block to be written contains all zero bytes.
This should help with sparse backing files (eg. raw, qcow2, dm-thin, etc).
Also, modify virt-resize to use this option by default when copying
devices. The savings in virt-resize can be quite startling, eg
'du -sh' (ie. true size) of a resized disk image:
8.1G /tmp/f15x32-resized.img # before this change
3.2G /tmp/f15x32-resized.img # after this change
This API is an easier to use version of the existing guestfs_available,
because the new API returns true/false instead of throwing an error
when a feature from the list is not available.
In truth we've had this implementation internally in the library
and several tools and in Sys::Guestfs::Lib for a long time. This
change just turns it into a publicly consumable API.
