[virt-tools-list] [virt-manager] Improving snapshot support

[Cole Robinson]

On 10/24/2018 12:55 PM, Povilas Kanapickas wrote:
> Hey,
> 
> I've been looking into supporting revert and delete operations for
> external snapshots [1] in libvirt and plan to do whatever it takes to
> land the feature. After these are done, there's nothing that prevents
> external snapshot support in virt-manager as far as I know.
> 

Very cool! I didn't look closely at the patches but it's great you are 
working on them, people have wanted improved external snapshot support 
for a while.

> Does it make sense improving this area of virt-manager in parallel
> without waiting for the changes to land in libvirt?
> 

Definitely. I wouldn't apply any changes that are dependent on new 
libvirt work until that work is applied, but we can review/discuss in 
parallel.

> The features that I would like to implement are the following:
> 
>    1) improved snapshot creation view
>      - add UI to select between internal and external snapshot modes
>      - add UI to list all the disks in the domain and allow selecting
> snapshot properties such as whether to snapshot the disk and the path of
> the snapshot.
> 
>    2) improved snapshot list view showing more information about
> snapshots such as the locations of the external disk snapshots for each disk
> 
>    3) hierarchical snapshot view so that it's possible to figure out the
> parent-children relationships between snapshots.
> 

All of that makes sense to me. I know some of those enhancements have 
been in the upstream bugtracker for a whole, search for 'snapshot' in 
these results if you're curious:

https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=MODIFIED&bug_status=ON_DEV&bug_status=ON_QA&bug_status=VERIFIED&bug_status=RELEASE_PENDING&bug_status=POST&classification=Community&component=virt-manager&list_id=9616181&product=Virtualization%20Tools&query_format=advanced

My recommendation for patch submission is to try and separate patches 
enough so the generic improvements (like snapshot hierarchy UI) are 
separate and come before work that may be dependent on external snapshot 
improvements, so it can be applied out of band.

- Cole