Open Stack

Hi,

Rather than adding more MAGIC_VARIABLE="foo" variables to devstack
that really only add lines to config files, I've been asking people to
add them to local.conf and provide additional corresponding
documentation if required.

However increased use has exposed some issues, now covered by several
reviews.  There seem to be three issues:

  1. preservation of quotes
  2. splitting of arguments with an '=' in them
  3. multi-line support

We have several reviews not dependent on each other but which will all
conflict.  If we agree, I think we should

  1. merge [1] to handle quotes
  2. merge [2] to handle '='s
  3. extract just multi-line support from [3]

All include test-cases, which should increase confidence

--

I did consider re-implementing a python tool to handle this; there
were some things that made me think twice.  Firstly ini settings in
local.conf are expected to expand shell-vars (path to neutron plugin
configs, etc) so you end up shelling out anyway.  Secondly
ConfigParser doesn't like "[[foo]]" as a section name (drops the
trailing ], maybe a bug) so you have to start playing games there.
Using a non-standard library (oslo.config) would be a big change to
devstack's current usage of dependencies.

-i

[1] https://review.openstack.org/124227
[2] https://review.openstack.org/124467/
[3] https://review.openstack.org/124502