Hey.

libguestfs seems to have an ever growing list of dependencies.


Some of them seem to be packages which have similar or same
functionality, e.g. gdisk/parted.

module-init-tools is a dummy.


Many others may very well be required for some functionality, which
is offered by libguestfs, which is however not used at all by most
people.

Recently, we got two bootmanagers (extlinux, syslinux).
Or what about mdadm, lvm2, btrfs-tools, cryptsetup, dosfstools,
mtools, gdisk, lsscsi, ntfs-3g, jfsutils, icoutils.
I mean I don't use any of these with my guest images but have to
install them and their dependecies.
Same for supermin,... never used it.
Or vim-tiny... why do I have to install that, if I've already
installed any of the full fledged vim packages?!



I mean it's okay if you depend on stuff that's needed for core-
functionality, but I'd guess that most of the above should be
rather recommends, and libguestfs should be so smart to detect
whether something is installed or not.

Look for example at the devscripts package, which also offers
a broad range of functionality which includes lots of dependencies,
but which handles this quite gracefully.

For now, *guestfs* has to go to the trash. :(


Cheers,
Chris.

* Christoph Anton Mitterer:

And if you look closely, some of the more esoteric dependencies have
recently been demoted to Recommends and Suggests via libguestfs-*
packages.

Thanks, that should be kmod | module-init-tools. Noted.

Most of those are for filesystems commonly found in VM images.

jfsutils is not a hard dependency.

Unless you used a "fixed appliance" with libguestfs, you have used
supermin.

You don't. libgeustfs0 "Suggests" libgeustfs-rescue and
libguestfs-rescue "Depends" vim-tiny. (This is something that ought to
be handled better, granted.)

Seriously, if you only wanted to rant, should I just go ahead and close
this bug report?