New image releases and image file names

[Barak Korren]

Hi there,

In the oVirt projects we're making some efforts to make it easy to get
stuff up and running on top of oVirt.

One of these efforts is maintaining a Glance server containing updated
"cloud" VM images of various distros including, among others, Fedora,
CentOS, Ubuntu and Atomic.

That Glance server is configured for use by default in all oVirt installations.

Since upstream images can update quite often, we've made efforts to
automate the process of polling the disro download servers for new
images, and downloading them into Glance.

In order to make images useful for users, we need to know various
details like which OS version is in the image. Since every distro has
got its own idea about how to organise the download server and name
the files in it, we had to resort to regex-matching the image files to
extract useful details about them.

This is why its very frustrating to us when an upstream changes the
way it names its image files. Especially when the files are named in a
way that prevents keeping an orderly image archive.

As a new CentOS Atomic image was recently released [1], we set about
to getting that image uploaded to our Glance server. We found out the
name of the new image file seems to be very different from how Atomic
images used to be called.

If seems the new image is called simply:
CentOS-Atomic-Host-7-GenericCloud.qcow2

This is while older images were called something like:
CentOS-Atomic-Host-7.1609-GenericCloud.qcow2

The newer name is useless as far as image version tracking goes. We
would like to request that the new naming scheme would be restored, or
at least some other scheme is created where its easy to automatically
figure out the image versions.

[1]: http://www.projectatomic.io/blog/2017/01/centos-atomic-jan17/

Thanks,

-- 
Barak Korren
bkorren at redhat.com
RHCE, RHCi, RHV-DevOps Team
https://ifireball.wordpress.com/