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

[Cole Robinson]

Daniel P. Berrange wrote:
> 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.

I updated the hasFile function recently to not grab files and instead just
test for their existence. This means we can change the distro detection
to actually just be dependent on whether the install media is found or
not. So the 'magic' file could be the file needed to actually run the
install which should avoid any misses for goofy trees.

- Cole