Interview with vzpkg2 and pkg-cacher creator Robert Nelson 27 September 2008 @ 05:19 pm
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[openvz]		Robert Nelson was kind enough to agree to an email-based interview which readers of the OpenVZ Users mailing list will have already seen. Robert has written a replacement for vzpkg (currently named vzpkg2) and has greatly enhanced it with the addition of a package named pkg-cacher. For an introduction to OS Templates and the tools used to manage them as well as Robert's fantastic answers, see:

Interview with vzpkg2 and pkg-cacher creator Robert Nelson

Obligatory quote:
ML: You have added a number of features / capabilities to vzpkg. Could you give us an overview of what's new?

Robert: I think the most significant change over the stock version of vzpkg is the separation of the packager specific code from the higher level code. This allows scripts to be written to support other package managers like apt which is used on Debian and Ubuntu.

The other slightly less significant change is the introduction of the concept of a hierarchical structure to the template meta data. Information which is the same for all versions and platforms of a distribution need only be specified once. If there is a need for separate settings for a specific version it can be overridden by a file lower in the template meta data tree.

Also new packager-independent commands have been added for managing packages in installed containers.
One thing worth mentioning is that while the number of OS Template Metadata packages provided by the OpenVZ Project is quite limited, Robert has created new metadata packages for vzpkg2 that allow for easily building CentOS, Debian, Fedora, and Ubuntu OS Templates. If I counted correctly, Robert's new metadata packages make it easy to build 44 different OS Templates. Wow!

It might take a few more weeks before vzpkg2 and pkg-cacher are finalized and added to the OpenVZ Project repositories. If you don't want to wait and would like to help out with testing, Robert has posted some instructions to the OpenVZ Users mailing list and here is a link to the archive for the time period in question:

http://openvz.org/pipermail/users/2008-September/thread.html
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