[Libosinfo] [osinfo-db PATCH 0/8] Add missing command line info for tree based installations

[Fabiano Fidêncio]

On Tue, Apr 30, 2019 at 9:11 PM Cole Robinson <crobinso at redhat.com> wrote:
>
> On 4/25/19 9:27 AM, Fabiano Fidêncio wrote:
> > Tree based installations will need more info from the command line than
> > what's currently provided by osinfo-db.
> >
> > For instance:
> > - OpenSUSE requires "install=URL"
> > - Silverblue requires "inst.repo=URL"
> > - Fedora < 19 requires "method=URL" and >= 19 requires "inst.repo=URL"
> > - CentOS/RedHat < 7 require "method=URL" and >= 7 require "inst.repo=URL"
> >
> > With those patches, management apps can rely solely in the command line
> > generated by us for doing tree based installations.
> >
>
> This is an improvement, but I was originally thinking we would expose
> the kernel argument in some way that it could be queried by apps
> directly. That way virt-install could eventually use it to drop our own
> hardcoded method/inst.repo/install mapping and just depend on osinfo-db
> to provide it. Maybe if we solve that problem too then the result will
> look a bit different

osinfo-db, at least for now, only cares about the kernel command line
when dealing with a unattended installation. And the way we deal with
that is: https://gitlab.com/libosinfo/libosinfo/blob/master/osinfo/osinfo_install_script.c#L1617

As far as I understand, your suggestion is to have the command-line
needed by the unattended installation exposed "somewhere", so apps
could query that even when not performing an unattended installation
using our scripts/APIs, right?

>
> I'm not really sure how to best do that besides putting a
> <kernel-url-arg> field or something in the <os>, but that seems
> inflexible. Any ideas? Some way to query the unattended API objects for
> this info?
>

A <kernel-url-arg/> attribute, under <os/>, may be the simplest way to
go, with the new osinfo_os_get_kernel_url_argument() API.

Daniel, what do you think?

> - Cole

If you have the time, please, file a ticket for that. if you don't
have the time, I'll file the bug on Thursday.

Best Regards,
-- 
Fabiano Fidencio