Seeding rulesets

[pranavgaikwad]

We expect to use konveyor/rulesets repository to store rulesets contributed by the community as well as rulesets we intend to ship with the LSP analyzers. Currently we do not have any community rulesets, we only have the rulesets converted by the windup shim that we want to seed. These rulesets form the built-in targets in Konveyor. In order to seed the rulesets, Konveyor needs to do a bit of pre-processing. Additionally, Konveyor has other seeding data (canonical tags, definitions of targets themselves and mapping) that needs to be stored somewhere. As a result, the konveyor/rulesets repository cannot be directly used by Konveyor for seeding.

Proposed solution here is to create another repository maintained separately that works off of konveyor/rulesets to seed the data as needed. This adds redundancy but the added burden doesn't seem unreasonable. Sounds like a good solution for Alpha. One problem with this approach is that Konveyor does not know which rulesets to seed...especially when there's a mix of community and built-in rules there.

I propose that we maintain a directory in konveyor/rulesets which will be used for seeding. All other directories will be ignored. Flow I imagine - the seed repository has mechanism to clone and get the directory of interest for seeding, do the preprocessing (probably use digest of the content to identify if there was an update to the rule).

Users can still use the community rules by creating custom targets. If we decide to seed any of the community rules, they should be vetted and moved to the correct directory in konveyor/rulesets . This is an easy solution that I think will get us past alpha release.

In the longer run, we want make it as easy as possible for users to use community rules. I believe custom targets, as of today, provide that flexibility. It is attractive to have a catalog of rules users can browse through and pick rules. It is possible to achieve something like that with konveyor/rulesets in the future.

@mansam @jortel @shawn-hurley @fabianvf