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

[Fabiano Fidêncio]

On Mon, Jun 11, 2018 at 10:07 AM, Felipe Borges
<felipe10borges at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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).

Having it as part of variant doesn't make me happy.

Think about a distro which doesn't have any variant id set but it's
still desktop (like ubuntu, for instance). By forcing this to be part
of variant we'd have to:
- Create the variant that would have exactly the same content as the
normal ditro;
- Add a new attribute to variant

While if we have it linked to the media itself as in [0] no additional
info is required apart from the flavour for those who'll choose to use
it.

[0]:
 32     <media arch="i686" flavour="server">
 33       <url>http://old-releases.ubuntu.com/releases/zesty/ubuntu-17.04-server-i386.iso</url>
 34       <iso>
 35         <volume-id>Ubuntu-Server 17.04(.\d)? i386</volume-id>
 36       </iso>
 37       <kernel>install/vmlinuz</kernel>
 38       <initrd>install/initrd.gz</initrd>
 39     </media>


What do you think, Felipe?

>
>> 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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-- 
Fabiano Fidêncio