Open Stack

On Wed, Nov 27 2013, Zane Bitter wrote:

>>
>> 	Parameters:
>> 		db_name:
>> 			group: db
>> 			order: 0
>> 		db_username:
>> 			group: db
>> 			order: 1
>> 		db_password:
>> 			group: db
>> 			order: 2
>> 		web_node_name:
>> 			group: web_node
>> 			order: 0
>> 		keypair:
>> 			group: web_node
>> 			order: 1
>
> -2 this is horrible.
>
> Imagine how much work this is for the poor author! At least they don't
> have to maintain parallel hierarchies of matching key names like in
> the original proposal, but they still have to manually maintain
> multiple lists of orderings. What if you wanted to add another
> parameter at the beginning? Maybe we should encourage authors to
> number parameters with multiples of 10. Like BASIC programmers in the
> 80s.
>
> And of course if you don't specify the order explicitly then you get
> random order again. Sigh.
>
> There's only one way that this is even remotely maintainable for a
> template author, and that's if they group and order stuff manually
> anyway (like you have in your example - people will do this
> automatically by themselves even if the syntax doesn't require them
> to). Since they have to do this, just display the parameters in the UI
> in the same order that they are defined in the file. This does the
> Right Thing even if the author doesn't know about it, unlike the
> explicit order thing which completely breaks down if the order is not
> explicitly stated. You probably won't even have to document it because
> literally 100% of people will either (a) not care, or (b) expect it to
> work that way anyway. In fact, you will almost certainly get bug
> reports if you don't display them in the same order as written.

+1 for implicit ordering.  I think this will be intuitive for users.