[Beaker-devel] Tool for Inventory gathering

Don Zickus dzickus at redhat.com
Tue Jul 9 13:55:10 UTC 2013


On Tue, Jul 09, 2013 at 02:51:08AM -0400, Amit Saha wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> The 'lshw' based inventory task also uses /proc/cpuinfo in addition to it's own 
> profiled information for the CPU details.
> 
> Currently the inventory gathered from 'lshw' is used for the CPU details, the
> memory details and the device details. I think it's worth a shot to see if reading
> from udev's database (via pyudev) can substitute the last purpose of lshw and hence
> just be free from the external tools.
> 
> Suggestions and thoughts welcome.

While it is nice to avoid unnecessary dependencies on external tools,
remember the advantages of doing so too.  That is if the output format
changes for any arch, those tools will be adjusted accordingly or if new
information presents itself, that would be immediately available using the
tool (one would assume).  On the other hand, doing this by hand as you
propose might keep things out of sync and increase the maintaince of such
a custom tool.

There are tradeoffs, it would be nice to know that the dependency on lshw
is so high that it benefits beaker to write its own tool.  Right now I
don't see it (doesn't mean it is not there though).

Cheers,
Don


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