[Libosinfo] RFC: Splitting off database into separate package

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Sun, Nov 15, 2015 at 02:22:47AM -0600, Yang Yu wrote:
> I am kinda late to the party.
> 
> This is indeed a much needed feature. Many distros have libosinfo
> package 6 mon+ old (missing recent OS releases).
> 
> - Is XML the format we want to use long term ?
> I agree with switching to json if the performance gain is significant.
> Not a high priority if performance isn't going to be a concern in
> short term.
> If xml support does not get discontinued, some well defined precedence
> to handle conflicts (in case a copy of xml database and a copy of json
> database are present at the same time) seems necessary.
> 
> - Do we need to mark a database schema version in some manner ?
> adding a hash associated with the version number to remind people if
> the database has been modified since released?
> adding a flag to prevent the database from getting overwritten by
> updates if the user wants to keep the modified version?
> 
> - Should we restructure the database ?
> 1 entity per file instead of a huge file with everything makes sense.
> Easier to maintain. I agree with your approach in [PATCH 00/39] Split
> up database XML files
> https://www.redhat.com/archives/libosinfo/2015-September/msg00043.html
> 
> - How do we provide notifications when updates are available
> Using DNS TXT record for update check is a brilliant idea. While
> having a separate package for database updates, I would like to see a
> method to update the database on demand outside the distro's package
> management (too much admin work and taking too long to publish).  It
> can be as easy as a script to operate in diff/overwrite mode. The
> files can be hosted on github or with cloudflare cdn so libosinfo.org
> won't get hammered too much.
> 
> 
> I tried to replace everything in /usr/share/libosinfo/db with the
> /data (except /data/schemas) from git and /usr/share/libosinfo/schemas
> with data/schemas. It did not work. Is there any change that prevents
> the current database from working on 0.2.11?

You can't directly use the files from git that end in '.xml.in' as they
are post-processed to add in translations to create the final '.xml'
files. If you run a build of git to generate the .xml files those
should then work


Regards,
Daniel
-- 
|: http://berrange.com      -o-    http://www.flickr.com/photos/dberrange/ :|
|: http://libvirt.org              -o-             http://virt-manager.org :|
|: http://autobuild.org       -o-         http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :|
|: http://entangle-photo.org       -o-       http://live.gnome.org/gtk-vnc :|