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

[Cole Robinson]

On 4/30/19 3:24 PM, Fabiano Fidêncio wrote:
> 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?
> 

Yeah something like that. I dunno if it makes sense as I'd need to check
the unattended code more deeply. Maybe add some unattended option to
actually make the install 'attended' :) ? Or some way to access the
command line template magic independent of the install script. Maybe
that's overthinking it...

>>
>> 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.
> 

Yeah that will certainly cover the only cases we have in virt-install so
maybe it's that simple

I filed:

https://gitlab.com/libosinfo/osinfo-db/issues/28

Thanks,
Cole