On Wed, 2022-11-23 at 14:11 +0000, Stephen Finucane wrote:
👋
tl;dr: $subject
I reviewed a patch against openstackclient (OSC) today [1] and left a rather lengthy comment that I thought worthy of bringing up to a wider audience. The patch itself doesn't matter so much as what is was trying to achieve, namely modifying an existing OSC command to better match the structure of the equivalent legacy client command. The review provides more detail than I do here but the tl;dr: is that this is a big no-no and OSC will and must maintain consistency between OSC commands over consistency with legacy clients. As I noted in the review, consistency is one of the biggest advantages of OSC over the legacy clients: if you know the name of the resource type you wish to work with, you can pretty accurately guess the command and its structure. This is a thing that operators have consistently said they love about OSC and its one of the key reasons we're trying to get every command to provide full current API implementations in OSC (and SDK).
Now I get that the way some of these consistent commands have been implemented has been the cause of contention in the past. I don't imagine it remains any less contentious today. However, these patterns are well-understood, well-known patterns that have for the most part worked just fine for close to a decade now. The kind of patterns I'm thinking about include:
- The command to create a new resource should always take the format '<resource> create <human-readable identifer>
- The command to modify some property of a resource should always take the format '<resource> set --property=value <name-or-identifier>'
- The command to list, fetch or delete resources should always take the format '<resource> list', '<resource> get <name-or-identifier>', and '<resource> delete <name-or-identifier>', respectively.
- Boolean options should always take the form of flags with an alternate negative option like '--flag' and '--no-flag', rather than '-- flag=<true|false>'
- And a couple of other things that we tend to highlight in reviews.
We want to preserve this behavior, lest OSC lose this huge USP and devolve into a muddle mess of different ideas and various individuals'/teams' preferences. I'm more than happy to discuss and debate this stuff with anyone who's interested and we'll continue reviewing each patch on its merit and providing exceptions to these rules where they make sense, but it will remain an ongoing goal and it's something we'd like people to consider when working on OSC itself or any of its plugins.
I will now get off my pedestal/ivory tower 🗼
Thanks! Stephen
I went ahead and proposed a patch to add this information to the OSC documentation. If you're interested, I'd suggest taking a look.
https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/python-openstackclient/+/865690 https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/python-openstackclient/+/865691
Stephen
PS: I'm talking here about the command themselves, not their implementations. We do somethings extra in OSC that are user helpful, like allowing users to identify resources by their name in addition to by their UUIDs. We also currently do things that no so user helpful, like crashing and burning if the name lookups fail (I'm thinking about the various Glance-related commands that error out if a project name/ID is passed to a command and the user can't look up that project). These are things we're more than willing to fix and will happily accept patches for :)
[1] https://review.opendev.org/c/openstack/python-openstackclient/+/865377