[389-devel] Re: [lib389] dsconf plugins support and cmd line design

On Tue, 2017-05-16 at 13:12 +0300, Ilias Stamatis wrote:
> Hello,

Hey mate,

>
> I'm going to add support for the memberOf plugin into the dsconf tool.
> However, because this is going to be the first plugin to be configurable
> through lib389, design decisions will affect all future plugins to be
> supported.
>
> I'd like thoughts on which approach would be more convenient for an admin.
>
> Right now, there's an initial general design for all plugins here:
> https://pagure.io/lib389/blob/master/f/lib389/cli_conf/plugin.py
>
> This suggests that we do things the following way:
>
> 1. "dsconf instance plugin enable" and then it prompts us to enter the dn
> of the plugin to enable.
> 2. "dsconf instance plugin config" and then it prompts again for a dn and
> displays configuration options *specific* to that plugin
>
> I think it might be more handy to avoid additional prompts and directly do
> things like the following:
>
> dsconf instance plugin memberof enable
> dsconf instance plugin memberof fixup

I'm really happy with this syntax. We could make it:

dsconf instance memberof enable

And leave "plugin" for generic plugins?

>
> However, this way we will end up with very long commands.
> eg.
> dsconf instance plugin memberof config modify "memberofattr" "memberOf2"

I don't think we would use this. Perhaps:

dsconf instance memberof config # Would show config
dsconf instance memberof config <attr> # Show just that attr
dsconf instance memberof config <attr> <value> # Set this value

I wonder now about multivalue attrs for this. I can see why you are
worried about it getting a bit long.

Something that would help is:

dsconf instance memberof config edit

Which wuold be similar to ldapvi and open $EDITOR with the entry, then
commits the diff when you change it. That would certainly make this
easier.

For the cli, I think perhaps the long setting may be unavoidable because
we need to express add/mod/rep/delete. We could likely take a cisco like
view and do;

dsconf instance memberof config a <attr> <value>

where add is shortened to the unique value. IIRC argparse supports this.

>
> which is huge.
>
> With the second approach it's easier to write scripts based on dsconf
> though.
>
> Any thoughts on this?
>


Thanks for your really thoughtful email about this!

--
Sincerely,

William Brown
Software Engineer
Red Hat, Australia/Brisbane