[et-mgmt-tools] OS type detection in virt-install/virt-manager

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Wed, Feb 13, 2008 at 09:38:11AM +0100, Alexander Todorov wrote:
> Hello,
> I was looking at the recent code in OSDistro.py
> Can we switch to using the new .treeinfo file and the information there 
> instead of the current if hasFile() mechanism?
> The .treeinfo provides with all the information needed to detect the 
> family type (Fedora, RHEL, CentOS ???) and boot images location.
> Also improve the acquire$FILE functions with that information.

What new .treeinfo file ?  It sounds interesting, but this is the first
I've heard of it... Is there anywhere that describes it ?

I don't see a .treeinfo file on the Fedora download sites, eg

http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/development/x86_64/os/

http://download.fedora.redhat.com/pub/fedora/linux/releases/8/Fedora/x86_64/os/

> The reason I'm requesting this: in newer Fedora repos the packages dir 
> is simply called "Packages" but not "Fedora" and wrt remixing tools it 
> may be called with any name I think. OSDistro.py uses the presence of 
> fedora.css in the repo to decide on a Fedora distribution. This file 
> is not essential to the install process and may be missing in some repos.
> 
> What do you think?

If there's ways we can improve the OS detection, I'm open to any suggestions.

Currently, we do the probing whether the user has manually selected a 
distro type or not.

One optimization would be to only do the probing if the user has NOT
explicitly selected a distro type. This would give users an easy way
to force the install to continue even if the 'magic' files are missing.

eg, if you select 'Fedora 8' in virt-manager it would just go straight
to the kernel/initrd fetch stage.

Dan.
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