xen-tools.xen-tools/TODO

TODO
====

See KNOWN_BUGS for real bugs.

Bugs to fix and features to add for 5.0
---------------------------------------

* xen-create-image man page overhaul:

- ambiguous option list with regards to parameters
- Set Fail in more situations where the script has clearly failed
  i.e.: lvm exists

* Test and support more file system types.

   Actually this should be pretty simple now that the parameters are
   stored in the configuration hash.

* Setup locales in the hooks?

   Currently no locales are set and this causes several domU errors
   which appear in the domU's logs.

* Documentation overhaul

   Better explain what roles /should be/ used for, and that roles
   are examples, and shouldn't cover every single scenario. They
   are also easy to write.

* Think again about disk_device checks :

   Newer Xen provides "xvda", older provided "sda". The current check for
   valid values of disk_device (used for root device in domU /etc/fstab)
   does only allow those values.
   This forbids any deployment of LVM/RAID _inside_ domU, which cannot
   be created by xen-tools anyway. So the current check is fine with the
   current possibilities of xen-tools, but could become a limitation.
   - Is it possible/wanted to "query" xend for default device names ?
   - Is it possible to create /dev/mapper devices with xend conf ?
   - Can we just avoid to ask for this value and not specify the device
   in /etc/fstab (and use /dev/root, /dev/by-uuid, or anything ?)

* xen-create-image --dist=... / sources.list generation should be more fine-grained

   xen-tools should offer the possibility to enable/disable
   security/volatile/backports as well as
   contrib/non-free/universe/restricted/multiverse for each of them
   not only based on defaults plus the Dom0's sources.list

   One idea is to allow parameters like

   --dist="lenny:main,contrib,non-free;security;volatile:main"

   and maybe (if the default will be to include security) to also
   allow

   --dist="lenny;no-security"

   The second idea (by Mathieu Parent) is to have an
   /etc/xen-tools/sources.list.d/ which then contains files like
   lenny.list, lenny-server.list, karmic.list, etc. which defaults to
   $dist.list, but can be also select with --sources-list=lenny-server
   (which looks for ./lenny-server.list, ./lenny-server,
   /etc/xen-tools/sources.list.d/lenny-server.list and
   /etc/xen-tools/sources.list.d/lenny-server in that order).

   Third variant is to use /etc/xen-tools/sources.lists/ instead of
   /etc/xen-tools/sources.list.d/ because that directory is no
   runparts-like directory.

* LVM snapshot support as an install source.

* Clean up mounts on Ctrl-C, causes error while installing otherwise:

   Removing /dev/vg0/acromantula-domu1-disk - since we're forcing the
   install Can't remove open logical volume "acromantula-domu1-disk"
   this should be a matter of unmounting the mounted volume from /tmp.

* Generic grub support

   This will generate a much nicer menu.lst as a side effect, as its
   currently generated once at install, and is never updated. Installing
   a full grub into the domU should update the menu.lst every time a
   new kernel is installed and will also use the domU distro's menu.lst
   conform.

* pv-grub support

   This is a ways away and will probably start with a xen-pv-grub
   package.

* Move the hooks directory to /etc/xen-tools/ to officially allow
   added and modified hooks.

* Clean up the hooks directory

   Currently we have one directory for Ubuntu and Fedora named after
   the first supported release which is then duplicated for each
   subsequent release.

   I'm sure this won't scale forever. So to minimise code duplication
   I'd like to have one common directory per distribution (e.g. called
   ubuntu-common, fedora-common, debian-common, maybe even deb-common,
   rpm-common or yum-common for dpkg/apt-, rpm/yum-based
   distributions, etc.) with generic hooks valid for all or most of
   the releases of one distribution and then one hook directory per
   release (e.g. called ubuntu-10.04 or ubuntu-lucid or so) which has
   symbolic links to everything which can be used unchanged from the
   common directory and new files for everything which has to be
   different or only there.

* Create users, add ssh pubkeys to .ssh/authorized_keys

   Still have to think of a good way of doing this. It would be nice
   To specify a directory of public keys, parsing the hostnames
   parsing the usernames from the ssh comment line

* More generic roles

   Deploy a web server or setup ssmtp directly via flag when setting up
   the machine. Open to suggestions, should just be some general use-cases
   that are fairly common.

* Sections for the xen-tools.conf file

   Currently it's really annoying when you are trying to create VMs
   on multiple subnets. It would be nice to specify with a flag what
   "type" of configuration you want, and a set of options specific to
   that flag could be parsed from xen-tools.conf

* Refactor the code for less code duplication

   Like e.g. readConfigurationFile in xen-create-image and
   xen-resize-image which are not completely identical.

* Refactor the code for less variants of calling cp, rm, mv, etc.

   E.g. always use either cp() from File::Copy or /bin/cp, but not
   both. To allow verbose copying, I (Axel) would prefer /bin/cp over
   cp();

* Parse numerical parameters transparently for the user

   The user shouldn't have to know weather he should specify size
   as <size>G or <size>Gb or <size>. This should be parsed without
   user interaction and rely on a common format.

* xen-update-image should mount /dev/pts before running apt-get

* xen-update-image should have options for using ...

   ... aptitude instead of apt-get

   ... dist-upgrade instead of upgrade

* Use Perl::Critic

Stuff from Steve's TODO list / Generic TODOs
--------------------------------------------

* Write more test cases.

* xen-delete-image should unallocate any used IP addresses.