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This was a feature that allowed you to add drives to the appliance after launching it. It was complicated to implement, and only worked for the libvirt backend (not "direct", which is the default backend). It also turned out to be a bad idea. The original concept was that appliance creation was slow, so to examine multiple guests you should launch the handle once then hot-add the disks from each guest in turn to manipulate them. However this is terrible from a security point of view, especially for multi-tenant, because the drives from one guest might compromise the appliance and thus the filesystems/drives from subsequent guests. It also turns out that hotplugging is very slow. Nowadays appliance creation should be faster than hotplugging. The main use case for this was virt-df, but virt-df no longer uses it after we discovered the problems outlined above.
This program generates a large amount of code and documentation for all the daemon actions. To add a new action there are only two files you need to change, 'actions_*.ml' to describe the interface, and daemon/<somefile>.c to write the implementation. After editing these files, build it (make -C generator) to regenerate all the output files. 'make' will rerun this automatically when necessary. IMPORTANT: This program should NOT print any warnings at compile time or run time. If it prints warnings, you should treat them as errors. OCaml tips: (1) In emacs, install tuareg-mode to display and format OCaml code correctly. 'vim' comes with a good OCaml editing mode by default. (2) Read the resources at http://ocaml.org/learn/ (3) A module called 'Foo' is defined in one or two files called 'foo.mli' and 'foo.ml' (NB: lowercase first letter). The *.mli file, if present, defines the public interface for the module. The *.ml file is the implementation. If the *.mli file is missing then everything is exported. Some notable files in this directory: actions_*.ml The libguestfs API. proc_nr.ml Procedure numbers associated with each API. structs.ml Structures returned by the API. c.ml Generate C API. <lang>.ml Generate bindings for <lang>. main.ml The main generator program. Note about long descriptions: When referring to another action, use the format C<guestfs_other> (ie. the full name of the C function). This will be replaced as appropriate in other language bindings. Apart from that, long descriptions are just perldoc paragraphs. Note about extending functions: In general you cannot change the name, number of required arguments or type of required arguments of a function, since this would break backwards compatibility. You may add another optional argument, *if* the function has >= 1 optional arguments already. Add it at the end of the list. You may add optional arguments to a function that doesn't have any. However you *must* set the once_had_no_optargs flag to true, so that the relevant backwards compatibility bindings can be added.