[Openstack-operators] [Openstack] OpenStack Client Followup

Duncan McGreggor duncan at dreamhost.com
Wed May 2 17:32:26 UTC 2012


You make some fair points.

But consider the large class of cloud users that will never need to
bring up OpenStack from scratch, but rather maintain them. These users
will need to be able to easily identify the commands that pertain to
their daily maintenance, troubleshooting, and reporting tasks. Design
of a CLI tool for different audiences is just as important as visual
interface design.

However, anticipating that now, before we have solid usage data, may
be premature.

In order to eventually deliver improved organization of CLI commands
and a good usability experience for all classes of users, I'd ask that
we at least leave room in the design of these tools such that
improving the command organization later will be a trivial task.

d

On Wed, May 2, 2012 at 9:14 AM, Dolph Mathews <dolph.mathews at gmail.com> wrote:
> I disagree with all three... the line between "admin" and "not admin" is
> going to get very blurry in the long run. Example: I may be a regular user,
> but I've been granted what is "normally" an admin capability on tenant X.
> Does that make me an admin? Do I now need to use two different clients?
>
> I also don't think it should be the client's *responsibility* to understand
> what capabilities are required for any given command (ultimately making
> *assumptions* about what the service will allow the user to do), as it's the
> remote service that's ultimately going to enforce it's own policies. It may
> be a decent feature to warn the user something is probably not going to work
> (or better yet, the ability to ask the remote service if something will
> succeed before we attempt it), but the client shouldn't prevent the user
> from trying -- especially by suppressing/isolating features. Horizon is
> going to face the same challenge (hiding/showing capability-relevant UI).
>
> tl;dr: openstackclient should be uniformly featured across all OpenStack
> API's ("service", "admin" or otherwise)
>
> -Dolph
>
> On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 6:55 PM, Doug Hellmann <doug.hellmann at dreamhost.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> There are a couple of ways to handle that:
>>
>> 1. A separate "openstackadmin" CLI that looks for commands using a
>> different plugin namespace, and therefore only loads the admin commands.
>>
>> 2. Prefix admin-related commands in the unified cli with "admin" (so
>> "openstack admin create network" or whatever).
>>
>> 3. Separate admin apps for each project.
>>
>> I think we should avoid 3, since that goes against the spirit of this
>> project. I like #2, but #1 would be easy to implement and could share 99% of
>> the code from the basic openstackclient.
>>
>> On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 4:59 PM, Matt Joyce <matt at nycresistor.com> wrote:
>>>
>>> How does this blueprint play into this client.  Is it a separate admin
>>> only client or just a subset of this guy?
>>>
>>> https://blueprints.launchpad.net/nova/+spec/admin-cli
>>>
>>> -matt
>>>
>>> On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 12:28 PM, Dean Troyer <dtroyer at gmail.com> wrote:
>>> > On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 2:11 PM, Adam Spiers <aspiers at suse.com> wrote:
>>> >> As of my recent patch, --help is contextual in nova:
>>> >
>>> > I hadn't seen that yet...
>>> >
>>> >> and I have started work on some of the other commands too, so it would
>>> >> be helpful if we could reach a consensus on this soon ... although
>>> >> please let me know if I am wasting my time working on other commands
>>> >> due to any imminent rewrites using python-openstack!
>>> >
>>> > The continued existence of the project-specific commands is really up
>>> > to the projects themselves.  I think it would be great to converge
>>> > them on things like this, but trying to get them all to work the same
>>> > is what led us to openstackclient due to backward compatibility and
>>> > all.  My guess would be that the existing client binaries would live
>>> > through the 'G' release even if we decided to deprecate them now.
>>> >
>>> >> I agree with Dolph - there is a precedent from other well-known
>>> >> programs (git, hg, svn are the first ones I can think of) for --help
>>> >> to behave differently depending on whether or not it was preceded by a
>>> >> subcommand.  So my vote is that we should definitely aim to adhere to
>>> >> this pattern.
>>> >
>>> > How about detailing it in the HIG and once we get a command or two
>>> > implemented with argument parsing we give it a shot?
>>> >
>>> > dt
>>> >
>>> > --
>>> >
>>> > Dean Troyer
>>> > dtroyer at gmail.com
>>> >
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>>
>>
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>
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