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Hi! Comments inline :)

2011/4/13 Diego Parrilla Santamaría <diego.parrilla.santamaria at gmail.com>:
> 1) OVF support. I know it's not exactly a disk image format, but
> probably we could look deeper if it make sense to add OVF or not. And
> if not, where does it fit in the overall architecture.
> 2) "Understand what is contained in the disk images". Is this a
> prerequisite for a kind of image builder, for example? May be I don't
> get it, what is the purpose of it?

So, both of the above allude to Glance becoming "smarter" than it is
now. Currently, Glance only "knows" what the user tells it about the
images they are storing. When a user adds/updates an image, a user
provides the disk image along with a set of image attributes such as
disk format (VDI, VMDK, raw, AMI, etc), container format (AMI, OVF,
bare, etc) and a set of zero or more custom key/value pairs (typically
things like "cpu_arch", "distro", etc). These attributes and custom
key/value pairs are all that Glance knows about an image. In other
words, Glance does not *inspect* the disk image by looking inside to
determine whether the supplied disk image data is of a particular
type. Point #2 alludes to adding to Glance some ability to inspect the
disk image data to determine the disk_format or container_format (and
other attributes) itself, instead of the user having to supply these
attributes manually.

Hope that makes a bit more sense, and gets the creative juices flowing
as to the potential possibilities for Glance (think: image conversion
from one format to another if Glance can inspect an image and
determine its format and what potential other image formats it could
convert it to...)

Cheers!
jay