[virt-tools-list] Plan for removing virtinst as a public API

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Mon, Feb 06, 2012 at 06:52:40PM -0500, Cole Robinson wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'd like to remove virtinst as a public API, and make it private code shared
> by virt-manager and virt-{install,clone,image,convert}.
> 
> virtinst really never should have been a library, it's historically not well
> thought out or stable, and really using the command line tools is a much more
> stable API. Longer term there are C libraries built around libvirt and gobject
> that are being developed which will fill the role of virtinst in a much more
> API friendly way. Privatizing this code will also allow us to clean house a
> lot, including hopefully merging virt-manager and virtinst into the same repo,
> so we don't have the annoying lockstep upgrade problem for developers.
> 
> There aren't many API users that I know of: aside from virt-*, there are
> pieces of cobbler and koji, which I'm in the process of patching.
> 
> Ideally I'd like to cut a release at the end of the month which drops virtinst
> as a public API and possibly merges the two repos.
> 
> Any comments or thoughts?

If we are to ever try to convert virt-manager / virt-instal over to
use libosinfo & libvirt-glib, then I think that declaring the existing
virtinst API as private is a mandatory step. The conversion will
require non-trivial changes to the existing code and it is just not
worth the pain of trying to retain compatibility for external apps.

Any other apps currently using virtinst's internal API should also
really be planning to switch to libvirt-glib + libosinfo themselves.

Daniel
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