Question/comment on nbdkit support in libvirt.spec

In this section (under %package libvirt-daemon-driver-qemu): %if %{with_nbdkit} Recommends: nbdkit Recommends: nbdkit-curl-plugin Recommends: nbdkit-ssh-plugin %endif You could save a bit of space by removing "Recommends: nbdkit" and replacing it with: Recommends: nbdkit-server Recommends: nbdkit-readahead-filter In Fedora packaging "nbdkit" is a meta-package which pulls in nbdkit-server, nbdkit-basic-plugins and nbdkit-basic-filters. This meta-package is intended to get a useful, functional nbdkit, but it's not very minimal. The basic plugins/filters pull in about an extra 1.3MB. nbdkit-basic-{plugins,filters} also "Provides" the names of the individual plugins and filters, so if (for example) you wanted the file plugin then you could just "Recommends: nbdkit-file-plugin" which would pull in nbdkit-basic-plugins (or something else if we ever moved that plugin to another package). nbdkit-curl-plugin / nbdkit-ssh-plugin are packaged separately because they have non-trivial dependencies on external libraries, and using Recommends for those is absolutely correct. They depend on nbdkit-server so it's not strictly needed to also "Recommends: nbdkit-server", but it is better for clarity. nbdkit-server includes nbdkit-null-plugin so you can still use that for probing filters. (I asked another question on a Jira ticket about if you are using --readonly since that improves performance with nbdkit-curl-plugin. Checking the source code I see you are, so that's great.) Rich. -- Richard Jones, Virtualization Group, Red Hat http://people.redhat.com/~rjones Read my programming and virtualization blog: http://rwmj.wordpress.com virt-p2v converts physical machines to virtual machines. Boot with a live CD or over the network (PXE) and turn machines into KVM guests. http://libguestfs.org/virt-v2v