Comment 5 for bug 198957

On Mon, Mar 10, 2008 at 10:44:34AM -0000, <email address hidden> wrote:
> I understand that its not a library package, thats not the point.

When you start your initial bug report saying "[...] so virt-manager
gets installed without some needed library files", then I think it's
quite relevant.

> The point is that in a default installation a user will always get
> this error message when trying to connect to the local machine (which
> is the default connection offered at startup). I would suggest that
> connecting to a remote libvirtd is not the first option most people
> would be trying.

That might be true, but I'm not convinced that virt-manager depending on
libvirt-bin is the correct solution to this that "problem". (Referring
to a simple fact (that most people will not attempt to connect to a
remote libvirtd as the first thing) as a problem seems a bit off to me,
hence the quotation marks)

> Anyone trying to use Virtmanager for the first time, with default
> options, will always get this error and won't be able to do anything
> until libvirtd is running (which is contained in the libvirt-bin
> package, not installed by default).

Erm, no. Anyone trying to use virt-manager for the first time, with
default options, will get an entirely *different* error, namely a
failure to connect to Xen.

> No one should have to look at that error message and work out for
> themselves what has to be done to get thing working when the default
> install of one small package could resolve the problem or perhaps a
> change to the user interface to make it explicit what the dependencies
> are.

The size of the package is not really all that interesting. There are
quite a few libraries of <100k in size, but I'm not going to add those
as a dependency either :)

Let's all just take a step back and look at the *problem*, rather than
what any of us guesses it the right solution. That tends to lead to the
correctest solutions.

Initial analysis: There are many Ubuntu users who'd like to try out the
new, cool virtualisation stuff. These users will often just have a
single machine for this and thus will want to have the daemon and the
management tools running on the same system. The essential packages
involved are: virt-manager, kvm, libvirt-bin. We'll refer to a system
with those packages installed as "a useful system".

Good so far?

Additional information: libvirt-bin is useful on its own. virt-manager
is useful on its own. kvm is useful on its own.

Problem: Getting from a clean install to a useful system is proving
difficult, inconvenient, or unobvious.

There are a number of different ways to turn a given system into a
useful system. Dependencies between the three relevant packages is
wrong, due to the fact that each package is useful on its own.

A new metapackage depending on all three packages is equally unobvious
(undiscoverable to the innocent bystander).

A useful notice when failing to connect to libvirtd saying that
"Connection to local libvirtd failed. Is libvirt-bin installed?" or
something to that effect is simple to implement, to the point, and
doesn't introduce wrong dependencies. Sounds like a plan?

--
Soren Hansen |
Virtualisation specialist | Ubuntu Server Team
Canonical Ltd. | http://www.ubuntu.com/