[Libosinfo] [RFC] Providing apps an easier way to update osinfo-db

[Fabiano Fidêncio]

Folks,

One thing that has been discussed between Felipe Borges (GNOME Boxes
maintainer) and myself is the possibility to, from an app, download
and install the latest osinfo-db content without being dependent of
distribution packagers and being able to ensure that the users will
have the most up-to-date db as soon as a something was
introduced/changed.

In order to do so, we'd have to (according to my understanding):
- Support URLs as arguments for osinfo-db-import:
  This step would allow the apps to download the latest release from
our official source;

- Expose a "latest" osinfo-db build:
  Currently we tag our releases, make a tarball and this tarball is
uploaded in pagure. The tarball's name looks like
"osinfo-db-20180612.tar.xz" and, preferably, we'd like to have
something like "osinfo-db-latest.tar.xz" pointing to the latest
release. Actually, in an ideal world, we'd like to have a
osinfo-db-latest.tar.xz pointing to the last osinfo-db commit (then,
maybe, we would have to rely on gitlab infra to do that?);

- Provide a DBus API for osinfo-db-import and osinfo-db-validate (at least):
  With this we can easily spawn, for instance, `osinfo-db-import
https://releases.pagure.org/libosinfo/osinfo-db-latest.tar.xz` from
any app using osinfo-db;

Ideas? Possible limitations?

Best Regards,
-- 
Fabiano Fidêncio