Re: Would be possible to have a ".treeinfo" file added to the installers' page?

[Fabiano Fidêncio <fabiano@fidencio.org>]

Antonio,

On Fri, Dec 7, 2018 at 11:10 AM Antonio Terceiro <terceiro@debian.org> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Dec 07, 2018 at 10:45:31AM +0100, Fabiano Fidêncio wrote:
> > Howdy!
> >
> > Firstly, sorry if I'm sending the message to the wrong mailing list.
> > If that's the case, please, point me to the right one.
> >
> > Although the subject says it all, let me explain the background of the
> > change so you all can get the idea of why it'd help a few projects
> > and/or even come up with a better solution than adding a  ".treeinfo"
> > file.
> >
> > I'm one of the maintainers of libosinfo[0], which is a project that,
> > basically, keeps info about OSes as such: the hardware they support,
> > the location for downloading ISOs, the location of online installation
> > trees, the minimum/recommended/maximum resources for an OS, scripts
> > for automating "JEOS"/"Desktop" installations and so on.
> >
> > One of the APIs provided by libosinfo is to guess an OS from its
> > online installation tree and it's easily done by a treeinfo file like
> > the ones that can seen here[1], here[2] and here[3]. For the Debian
> > case however, as the ".treeinfo" file is not used, we're struggling
> > about having a reliable way to guess the OS from its tree because we
> > didn't find a specific file that we could try to inspect in order to
> > decide whether the installation tree is for debian7, debian8, debian9,
> > debian-testing ...
>
> Does this work for you?
>
> on Debian 9:
>
> $ cat /etc/os-release
> PRETTY_NAME="Debian GNU/Linux 9 (stretch)"
> NAME="Debian GNU/Linux"
> VERSION_ID="9"
> VERSION="9 (stretch)"
> ID=debian
> HOME_URL="https://www.debian.org/";
> SUPPORT_URL="https://www.debian.org/support";
> BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.debian.org/";
>
> and on Debian unstable:
>
> $ cat /etc/os-release
> PRETTY_NAME="Debian GNU/Linux buster/sid"
> NAME="Debian GNU/Linux"
> ID=debian
> HOME_URL="https://www.debian.org/";
> SUPPORT_URL="https://www.debian.org/support";
> BUG_REPORT_URL="https://bugs.debian.org/";

Thanks for the answer! But, unfortunately, this is not related to what
I'm looking for. Your suggestion would work well for an *installed*
system. What we're trying to do is recognize an installation tree and
match it the OS that *will* be installed.

So, what I'm looking for is something like:
http://ftp.debian.org/debian/dists/stretch/main/installer-amd64/.treeinfo,
where the .treeinfo would  have something like:
```
[header]
version = 1.0

[release]
name = Debian Stretch
version = 9

[general]
arch = amd64
family = Debian
name = Debian Stretch
version = 9
platforms = amd64

[images-amd64]
kernel = current/images/netboot/debian-installer/amd64/linux
initrd = current/images/netboot/debian-installer/amd64/initrd.gz
```

With that, we (as libosinfo) could easily match which Debian version
we're dealing with and, even more, exactly know the location from
where we could fetch the kernel and the initrd in order to perform a
"tree" based installation.

Is it more clear now?

Best Regards,
-- 
Fabiano Fidêncio