Bug#939600: ITP: vmfs6-tools -- Tools to access VMFS6 filesystems

[Thomas Ward <teward@ubuntu.com>]

Package: wnpp
Severity: wishlist
Owner: Thomas Ward <teward@ubuntu.com>

* Package name    : vmfs6-tools
  Version         : 0.1.0
  Upstream Author : Multiple (details below)
* URL             : https://github.com/teward/vmfs6-tools
* License         : GPL-2+
  Programming Lang: C
  Description     : Tools to access VMFS6 filesystems

VMFS6 is a clustered filesystem designed to store virtual machine disks for
VMware ESX or ESXi Server hosts. This set of tools allows to access these
filesystems from some other non ESX/ESXi host for e.g. maintenance tasks.

Only read access is available at the moment, but write access is under
works. Multiple extents are supported.

The VMFS can be accessed with a command line tool or mounted through a
userspace filesystem (FUSE-based).

This version of VMFS Tools is designed to work with VMFS6, it is not
guaranteed to support VMFS5; if you need VMFS5 support, then use the
vmfs-tools package instead.

------

Multiple 'authors' have had their ways in this package.  The complete
authors list is:

- Christophe Fillot <cf@utc.fr>  (Original VMFS, which Mike Hommey based this
on)
- Mike Hommey <mh@glandium.org>  (Original vmfs-tools packager)
- Weafon Tsao <weafon.tsao@accelstor.com> (Created the vmfs6-tools fork for
VMFS6)
- Thomas Ward <teward@ubuntu.com> (Myself, as I made some changes to the fork
for coinstallability with vmfs-tools)

Note that as vmfs6-tools was never actually given a stable release number, I
made a release number of 0.1.0 on my own fork of Weafon's repository, which is
the basis of this packaging. That forked repository can be found on GitHub
(https://github.com/teward/vmfs6-tools).

The closest package in similarity to this one is vmfs-tools. However, the vmfs-
tools package only has VMFS support up to version 5. VMware ESXi 6 and later
use VMFS version 6 formatted file systems, which have substantial changes from
version 5. Because VMware ESXi 6 and later use vmfs6, we need to have VMFS6
compatible tools in the repository. However, while vmfs6-tools has VMFS6
support, it is not guaranteed to support vmfs5 well, which makes it infeasible
to switch to the forked package in place of vmfs-tools, which is guaranteed to
support VMFS5.

Because the fork of vmfs-tools to create vmfs6-tools by Weafon Tsao was not
designed with reverse compatibility in mind, it makes sense to package
vmfs6-tools separately alongside the vmfs-tools package to provide vmfs6
support.

This package will be maintained by me, and updated for packaging policy as
needed. However, there has been no movement at either vmfs-tools or vmfs6-tools
for some time, and therefore there may not ever be actual version bumps to the
software.