[virt-tools-list] Proposal: A place to store metadata about guests

[Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)]

On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 1:32 PM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones at redhat.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 01:04:07PM +0300, Zeeshan Ali (Khattak) wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 12:48 PM, Richard W.M. Jones <rjones at redhat.com> wrote:
>> >
>> > I think we need a place to store general metadata about guests.
>> >
>> > Here are some uses:
>> >
>> >  - Store data about available installer ISOs, guests which are
>> >   archived and not known to libvirt.
>>
>>   We will need this for our desktop integration plans but the
>> understanding is that we depend on Tracker[1] for this. Tracker will
>> need to be hacked to be able to differentiate between installer and
>> non-installer ISOs though but thats pretty much doable. I just wonder
>> if that solution also works for you?
> [...]
>> [1] http://projects.gnome.org/tracker/
>
> Where was it planned?

   In a meeting we (a few members of the SPICE team) had at the
desktop summit together with designers. Its not really a plan plan but
more like a general agreement/understanding for now and we still await
the designers to finalize it all.

> Tracker seems to be a desktop search engine.
>
> Can we make the data available to Tracker without requiring it?
> (Seems one has to write a "tracker miner" to do this)

  The metadata you mean? Yes, thats going to be in osinfo. I intend to
write a minor that extracts just volume, system and publisher IDs and
a boolean indicating if the ISO is bootable but all that doesn't need
to use libosinfo (though there will be some minor duplication of
code).

> Do we know that Tracker will stay around long-term (unlike Beagle etc)?

  Beagle never really stayed around but Tracker hasn't just been
around for quite some time now but is also a blessed dependency in
GNOME and some of the core hackers of it are trust-worthy GNOME
hackers.

> Is it available without requiring GNOME and other heavyweight deps
> (eg. servers, KDE)?

  Yes! You still need dbus session though.

-- 
Regards,

Zeeshan Ali (Khattak)
FSF member#5124