[Engine-devel] libosinfo integration

[Daniel P. Berrange]

On Mon, Sep 24, 2012 at 04:51:37PM +0200, Roy Golan wrote:
> Here's a draft wiki of the libosinfo integration with the engine
> http://wiki.ovirt.org/wiki/Libosinfo
> 
> please share your comments on this thread and I'll update the wiki
> accordingly.

As a libosinfo maintainer I strongly discourage you from writing a custom
API directly against the XML. While the format is stable from the POV
that vendors/users can create new XML docs for new/customized OS variants
they have, we do not consider it something for applications to be using
directly. The libosinfo library API includes alot of logic beyond simply
being an convenient way to process the XML. In particular dealing with
the inheritance of data across OS, searching for data across a variety
of data sources, relying on GIO for URI resolving, live update of the
database, and more.

We're also not really interested in maintaining manually written bindings
for any languages. Rather than putting effort into such bindings for Java,
time is better spent on finishing the GOBject introspection mapping layer
for Java. There was a proof of concept, which was never finished / updated
to the final introspection spec, which can be used as a basis for ongoing
development.

 https://live.gnome.org/JGIR

This work will be applicable way beyond just libosinfo, to a wide
variety of useful APIs. Of possible interest to VDSM in the future will
be things like the new libvirt-designer & libvirt-builder APIs which
are going to provide a bridge between libvirt + libosinfo to simply
life for application developers constructing XML for provisioning
guests.


Daniel
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