[virt-tools-list] Re: libosinfo - another try

[Matthew Booth]

On 22/10/09 17:37, Hugh O. Brock wrote:
> On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 11:47:25AM -0400, Cole Robinson wrote:
>> On 10/22/2009 05:47 AM, Arjun Roy wrote:
>> If we are going to use 'ID' here as the unique identifier, I think it
>> should have some human readable value. Just using numbers will quickly
>> become confusing if manually navigating the XML.
>>
>> In the previous discussion, someone mentioned just using<name>  as the
>> unique identifier, however I don't think that is sufficient either,
>> since it is not very machine friendly. Something like
>>
>> "Fedora 12" ->  "fedora12"
>> "Red Hat Enterprise Linux 5.4" ->  "rhel5.4" or
>>                                    "red_hat_enterprise_linux_5.4"
>>
>> Think of using this value from the command line (like virt-install
>> --os-variant), no one is going to want to have to use spaces and proper
>> capitalization, or a plain digit.
>
> I believe mdbooth was investigating something in CIM around the
> canonical naming of distros... Matt? Could be useful here.

Yes. OVF mandates usage of an OS taxonomy defined in CIM. You can find 
the canonical list by downloading the spec in XML form from here:

http://www.dmtf.org/standards/cim/cim_schema_v2220/cim_schema_2.22.0Final-XMLAll.zip

Search in there[1] for 'BSDUNIX', which is in the middle of the list. 
Note that there are some significant omissions from this list (including 
Fedora, for eg). Also note that it's very inconsistent:

* Windows (R) Me
* Windows XP
* Windows Vista
* Windows 2000
* Microsoft Windows Server 2008

vs

* RedHat(sic) Enterprise Linux

Do note that these descriptions are just that. They actually correspond 
to a numerical ID which is further up. Maybe this means we can get them 
fixed.

I will be sending them a request to add some new entries in due course, 
but I don't see how this list can ever be anything other than horrible. 
That said, it is canonically horrible, so we should map to it. May I 
suggest that the numerical CIM TargetOSType identifier is mandatory? 
We'll have to think of something both consistent and useful to do with 
entries not currently in the CIM list, though.

Matt

[1] Don't try to open this 27MB XML file in firefox: it will die, 
dragging your machine into swap death in the process. 'xmllint --format 
all_classes.xml | less' works well for me.
-- 
Matthew Booth, RHCA, RHCSS
Red Hat Engineering, Virtualisation Team

M:       +44 (0)7977 267231
GPG ID:  D33C3490
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