Kay Williams wrote:

We have an application that builds custom distributions based on RHEL, CentOS or Fedora. We would like to install these over the network using virt-install, but we've run into an issue with the distro check logic. Specifically, virt-install fails unless it finds a string "Red Hat Enterprise Linux", "Fedora" or "CentOS" within the family field of the .treeinfo file.

Our application currently sets the family field to the user-provided distro name (see below). We have avoided using the base distro name given trademark concerns.

[general] family = <user provided value> variant = <user provided value>

We can get virt-install to pass the distro check by setting the family name to one of the accepted values, e.g.

[general] family = Fedora variant = [user provided distro name]

Is this the expected/desired use for the family and variant fields? Or is there another approach we should consider?

Thanks, Kay

(cc-ing et-mgmt-tools, since that is the list for virt-install/ virt-manager) We shouldn't be failing if the family/variant is unknown: it's really just a convenience check. We can just assume it's an unknown distro and continue on, checking for [images-xen] and so on.. The code may need to be reworked a bit to accomodate this. Although we don't do it at the moment, I could see us in the future using this family/variant value to check our internal db on whether to set up virtio and other specific settings. So using custom values here may not allow virt-install to choose an optimal config, but we should still try and let the install proceed. - Cole