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

[Fabiano Fidêncio <fabiano@fidencio.org>]

On Mon, Feb 18, 2019 at 9:20 AM Fabiano Fidêncio <fabiano@fidencio.org> wrote:
>
> On Tue, Jan 22, 2019 at 3:02 PM Fabiano Fidêncio <fabiano@fidencio.org> wrote:
> >
> > Bastian,
> >
> > Firstly, sorry for the late reply. This e-mail got lost in my inbox, my bad! :-(
> >
> > On Mon, Jan 7, 2019 at 4:09 PM Bastian Blank <waldi@debian.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > On Fri, Dec 07, 2018 at 10:45:31AM +0100, Fabiano Fidêncio wrote:
> > > > 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 not exactly sure what you expect from this.  Maybe it would be
> > > easier if you provide a complete example, including information for at
> > > least one non-mainstream architecture.
> >
> > Does aarch64 counts as non-mainstream architecture?
> > If so, here's one example:
> > http://mirror.vutbr.cz/fedora/releases/29/Server/aarch64/os/.treeinfo
> >
> > About "not exactly sure what you expect from this", virtualization
> > management apps (like virt-manager) can perform a "network based"
> > installation taking as parameters only the "location".
> > The location, for the specific debian stable case is:
> > https://ftp.us.debian.org/debian/dists/stable/main/installer-amd64/
> > and, from this location, there's some hardcoded assumptions in the
> > code about where the kernel + initrd could be found and from there
> > virt-manager knows what to do.
> >
> > We, as libosinfo, already have the information about the "location"
> > and where the kernel/initrd are stored, this is cool and works as
> > expected. However, one thing that we try to do is given a URL, we try
> > to guess the OS from the URL and return the proper OS (and its
> > version) to apps like virt-manager, so virt-manager can do things like
> > perform an express installation (preseed installation) ...
> >
> > With the current situation, there's nothing we (as libosinfo) could
> > look at and try to figure out which version of Debian we're dealing
> > with (and, then, provide the info about resources to be used and what
> > not), thus the suggestion to have, under https://.../installer-amd64/
> > the ".treeinfo" file that could help us to properly detect which
> > system we're dealing with and, mainly, provide the correct information
> > for apps like virt-manager.
> >
> > Is this more clear? I mean, the expectations and the whole reasoning
> > behind my e-mails?
> >
> > >
> > > > [1]: http://download.opensuse.org/pub/opensuse/distribution/leap/15.0/repo/oss/.treeinfo
> > > > [2]: http://mirror.vutbr.cz/fedora/releases/29/Server/x86_64/os/.treeinfo
> > > > [3]: http://mirror.centos.org/centos-7/7/os/x86_64/.treeinfo
> > >
> > > How do you detect those special paths?  Because you already need to know
> > > them somehow.
> >
> > Those are part of osinfo-db. So, for every new debian release we'd add
> > a new debian entry and in the entry you can see something like:
> > https://gitlab.com/libosinfo/osinfo-db/blob/master/data/os/debian.org/debian-testing.xml.in#L45
> >
> > So, from this we can already tell mgmt apps the debian-testing URL and
> > from where they should get the kernel + initrd in order to boot.
> > However, if a custom URL is passed to libosinfo there's no way we
> > could detect it as a "debian-testing" URL as we do not know what we
> > should look for to ensure that.
> > Do you get what I'm trying to say? Basically, we can't start parsing
> > URLs in order to try to detect OSes, we should do that based on
> > something *under* the path passed (https://.../installer-amd64) that
> > we could just try to parse and ensure "it's a debian9".
> >
> > The .treeinfo idea was suggested mainly because it's been already used
> > in other places (as pointed out by the examples above), but I'd be
> > more than happy to adapt libosinfo code to check for something else as
> > long as we know what to check for.
> >
> > >
> > > Bastian
> > >
> > > --
> > > Hailing frequencies open, Captain.
> > >
> >
> > Best Regards,
> > --
> > Fabiano Fidêncio
>
> Ping?
>
> --
> Fabiano Fidêncio


Ping?
-- 
Fabiano Fidêncio