Roadmap for future releases --------------------------- Before you read this: (1) To see what's in the current release, read 'RELEASE-NOTES'. (2) To see the list of bugs, read 'BUGS'. (3) To understand libguestfs versioning, read section 'LIBGUESTFS VERSION NUMBERS' of guestfs(3) man page. (4) For general "might be good to have" items, see 'TODO'. For next major stable release (1.10) ------------------------------------ * Continue with general reduction in use of Perl. This is not because we think Perl is a bad thing or anything like that, but because a major consumer (RHEV) does not want to include the Perl interpreter in the tiny hypervisor they ship, thus any tool written in or requiring Perl cannot be used by RHEV. OCaml and other high-level compiled languages are fine. For 1.8 we rewrote many tools in C. * Make 'guestfish --ro' be the default, and get users to use 'guestfish --rw' for write access (but allow the default to be overridden in a configuration file). This was originally planned for 1.8 but there's not nearly enough adoption of the new 'guestfish --rw' option out there to do this yet. * Allow alternate methods to start the appliance, including through libvirt and by connecting to an existing appliance. This was originally planned for 1.8 but we didn't get patches in time. * Deeper and wider support for progress messages. Many long-running operations in guestfs-browser don't display progress messages, eg. "du", "tar-in/out", because it's hard to estimate the runtime of these commands. We should modify the protocol so that the library can hint at when progress messages would be useful (there's no point going to extra lengths to generate them if on the library side no one is registered to listen to them), and modify the daemon to try harder to generate them, even if they are only estimates. Also GtkProgressBar supports a "pulse mode" where it indicates activity with no time estimate, and we should try to support that as well. * Better handling of partitions, including MBR extended partitions (RHBZ#593511, RHBZ#602997, RHBZ#642821). Bugs assigned to 1.10 (put "1.10" in the Devel Whiteboard field in Bugzilla): https://bugzilla.redhat.com/buglist.cgi?query_format=advanced&field0-0-0=cf_devel_whiteboard&bug_status=NEW&bug_status=ASSIGNED&bug_status=MODIFIED&bug_status=ON_DEV&bug_status=ON_QA&bug_status=VERIFIED&bug_status=FAILS_QA&bug_status=RELEASE_PENDING&bug_status=POST&bug_status=PASSES_QA&type0-0-0=anywords&value0-0-0=1.10&component=libguestfs&product=Virtualization%20Tools&classification=Other Beyond 1.10 ----------- * Hot plugging of disks using QMP. This would allow more efficient reuse of the appliance in some circumstances: multiple disks (ie. VMs) can be added in turn to the same appliance. In particular this would help virt-df. [Note this requires upstream work on QMP, see: https://www.redhat.com/archives/libguestfs/2011-March/msg00124.html] See TODO and BUGS files.