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

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Fri, Oct 23, 2009 at 10:44:38AM +0100, Matthew Booth wrote:
> 
> 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.

Welcome to the failboat :-(  That list is utterly useless. It distinguishes
different Windows versions, but not different Linux versions. Integer ID
values are just horrible.

IMHO for osinfo we should stick the full official release names given by
the vendor/distributor, and as I suggested in other thread go for a RDF
URI scheme for unique identifiers since that's the only way you get
something that's easily extendable by independant 3rd parties - we can't
rely on a central person maintaining lists of integer IDs.

One of the extra pieces of metdata we have can then be a category mapping 
to the nearest practical CIM OS name / ID

> 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. 

Yep, we can't rely on a centrally maintained database since that prevents
the goal of allowing users to easily add their own variants.

> 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.

IMHO CIM data should just be an optional extra metdata tag. So if we have
a mapping to the CIM OS then include it, but otherwise ignore it because
it is just horrible

Regards,
Daniel
-- 
|: Red Hat, Engineering, London   -o-   http://people.redhat.com/berrange/ :|
|: http://libvirt.org  -o-  http://virt-manager.org  -o-  http://ovirt.org :|
|: http://autobuild.org       -o-         http://search.cpan.org/~danberr/ :|
|: GnuPG: 7D3B9505  -o-  F3C9 553F A1DA 4AC2 5648 23C1 B3DF F742 7D3B 9505 :|