[lxc-devel] [Lxc-users] Request for inclusion into mainline LXC utils

[Daniel Lezcano]

Dominik Schulz wrote:
> Am Samstag 30 Januar 2010 21:54:29 schrieb Guillaume ZITTA:
>> Sorry for the late response, I was on holidays.
>> I do think joining efforts is always a good thing.
>> I think some things needs to be defined :
>> - best practices for a good container is (no udev, syslog conf...)
>> - what minimal features we expect from container creation scripts.
>> - who works on it.
> Hi,
> I'm rather new to LXC but I'm already working on improving the existing tools.
> 
> My work is based on that of Nigel Mcnie [1]. Since he doesn't seem to  be 
> fully involved into LXC I'm looking for a place to contribute my patches to.
> 
> I propose a clear separation of concerns. The core package "lxc" should only 
> include the essential userland tools, mostly those written in C.

I agree.

> The fancy ones should go into a package of their own. Either separated by distribution 
> (lxc-debian, lxc-redhat, ...) or all in one (lxc-utils).


There is too much combination of containers configuration, IMO it should 
be preferable to keep them separated:
  lxc-debian (lenny, sid, ...)
  lxc-fedora (f10, f11, ...)
  lxc-opensuse (10.1, 11.0, 11.1, ...)
  lxc-busybox (statically linked or not)

That would be nice to identify clearly who handle a script(s).

That do not prevent to build on top of these scripts a single one.

There is also the sysvrc vs upstart configuration.

We have to deal with the host vs container distro too.

There is the container configuration itself (eg. macvlan, vlan, veth, 
etc ... ) to be interactive or not, and the distros configuration (eg. 
static ip or dhcp).

Note people would be interested by templates which are not only distros 
but also simple applications like sshd or apache+mysql. Why running a 
full container to host a web browser ?

> Further I propose not to separate tools which should be united in one. I'd 
> like to see the a separation of the container-creation tools based on the 
> lower level programs they use. Something like lxc-debootstrap for Debian-based 
> distributions and something alike for the ones based on RPM. Because 
> separating Debian and Ubuntu doesn't seem to support achieving our objectives. 
> They are just to similar in terms of creating containers.

There is the febootstrap command.

> (Partly) in contrast to the proposal of Daniel Lezcano [2] I'd propose to keep 
> the core utils small and simple (following the well known KISS principle) and 
> don't go for templates which are called by lxc-create. Instead I'd keep lxc-
> create as small as possible and incorporate it into other tools, which I've 
> mentioned above.

That makes senss.

Should we have a separate project ? or shall we keep these scripts in 
the lxc source tree in a different location in order to have the core 
and the templates synced ? For example, Michael H. Warfield and Tony 
Risinger are writing some useful scripts to shutdown / reboot the 
containers, I hope that won't be a third package, so the user will be 
totally lost.