[Libosinfo] Request for feedback: Differentiate server/desktop ISOs

[Felipe Borges]

Hi!

On Fri, Jun 8, 2018 at 5:07 PM Fabiano Fidêncio <fabiano at fidencio.org> wrote:
>
> People,
>
> I've talked to Felipe Borges a few days ago and he told me one thing
> he'd need, from GNOME Boxes perspective, is whether an ISO is intended
> to be a "Desktop" or a "Server" ISO.

Thank you for pushing this forward!

> IMO supporting this on libosinfo should be fairly easy, but I'd like
> to check with all you whether my approach seems okay, before start to
> implement it.
>
> A simple "flavour" field in the <media> entry would do the job. We can
> have an enum as "desktop", "server" and "default". The "default" would
> be selected in case anything is specified and would be treated as
> "it's not specific a desktop neither a server ISO".

I would suggest a syntax which would add an optional extra property to
the <variant> node. Why?

Distros might want to call their flavours differently. For instance,
Fedora calls its desktop flavour "workstation", while Ubuntu calls it
"Desktop".

So something like:

<variant id="workstation" flavour="desktop">
  <_name>Fedora 29 Workstation</_name>
</variant>

In terms of XML, the "flavour" property should be a defined one just
like the architecture names (see 'archnames' in the osinfo schema).

> The idea behind this is to simple allow apps as GNOME Boxes to sort
> how they'd present the medias to the users according to what the user
> needs.

Yay!

With my suggestion above, we could:

  - present the distros in the UI exactly as they want (Fedora wants
its desktop flavour to be called "Workstation" and we shall respect
that);
  - programmatically present distros of a specific flavour (for
instance, suggest the "desktop" flavour in the recommended downloads
view);
  - Create advanced filters, combining flavours, architectures, and whatnot.

These are my couple of cents.

Cheers,
Felipe.

> Is this approach okay? May I start implementing it?
>
> Best Regards,
> --
> Fabiano Fidêncio
>
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