[Libosinfo] unattended installation support

[Cole Robinson]

On 6/4/19 3:30 AM, Fabiano Fidêncio wrote:
> People,
> 
> libosinfo/osinfo-db claims to support unattended installations of
> various OSes and all the possible versions of each OS. However, this
> is not tested (apart from people using it on Boxes).
> 
> There are a few things that come to my mind:
> - Having tests for unattended installations:
>   - First step towards this has been done with the unattended
> installation support being added to virt-installl. A lot more work
> will need to be done in order to actually have it tested in a sane way
> ...

Yeah. There's definitely opportunity for some unit style tests in
virt-install, but this stuff will need a functional test suite in some
form, and some of it non-public for the windows stuff at least.

> - Drop support for EOL systems:
>   - We claim to support Fedora >= 3. Was this ever tested?
>   - We support Windows >= 2k. This was tested back in 2012 ... but is
> this something we really should keep?
> > My suggestion (and I'd like to get the others maintainers bless) is
> to, right now, only keep support for:
> - Linuxes: The supported versions of the distros (so, for instance,
> for Fedora ... just support Fedora29 and Fedora30);
> - Windows: Windows 7+
>
Dropping win2003 and earlier will simplify app implementations because
they can (probably) avoid the floppy requirement, like we discussed on
IRC. So I think that helps quite a bit. There's still definitely people
using winxp (despite being out of support microsoft just pushed a patch
update last week) but I don't think we need to support unattended
installs there anymore.

My opinion is mixed on killing off unattended support for EOL distros.
Doing a one time purge now is one thing, but going forward is the more
interesting bit. It would mean that working virt-install command line
invocations may break in the future which I never like. But I don't want
osinfo to be restricted by maintaining unattended compat with a ton of
old distros...

Maybe we can have an informal tier system based on what we test. So when
making unattended changes to git, we only functional test the non-EOL
distros. When a distro goes EOL we can fork off the install script to
fossilize it, so changes we make for Fedora 30 don't alter the config
for EOL Fedora 28.

Presumably if we do a one time test of say Fedora14 installing
correctly, then we fork the unattended install script, we can have
reasonable confidence that it will continue to work into the future
unless things change on the Fedora side. But we only do full install
testing with latest supported Fedora. But if for example fedora14 is
already broken then I'd say just drop it

- Cole

> By taking this path we'll have an easier time to ensure that our
> scripts are working and also reduce the maintainability of those.
> 
> Shall I go for this change?
> 
> Best Regards,
> 


- Cole