CLI Tools

[Andrew Jeffery]

Hi Wilfred,

On Wed, 24 Jul 2019, at 14:04, Wilfred Smith wrote:
> There was a discussion a while back (2 years ago? In 
> https://lists.ozlabs.org/pipermail/openbmc/2016-November/005307.html) 
> where the OP (Patrick Williams) expressed concern over the 
> proliferation of command line tools. Patrick’s interest involved how to 
> integrate iotools. Others chimed in questioning whether it’s better to 
> provide compact commands for common needs or encourage exploration by 
> requiring longhand. Patrick inquired about the target audience for the 
> tools.

I'm all for helpers for common tasks. If we can integrate them into obmcutil
that would be ideal. The alternative is that we require people write things like:

# busctl set-property `mapper get-service /xyz/openbmc_project/control/host0/auto_reboot` /xyz/openbmc_project/control/host0/auto_reboot xyz.openbmc_project.Control.Boot.RebootPolicy AutoReboot b false

to disable auto-reboot or

# busctl set-property xyz.openbmc_project.Network /xyz/openbmc_project/network/eth0 xyz.openbmc_project.Network.EthernetInterface DHCPEnabled b 1

to switch DHCP on. Quite frankly that's a ridiculous requirement to force on
everyone.

Having said that some of these already have shortcuts, such as

# systemctl stop host-failure-reboots at 0

for the auto-reboot line above, however the fact that it's a systemd unit
isn't exactly intuitive either.

So I'm happy for people to propose e.g. sub-commands for obmcutil to
help out. We might need more feedback than just my opinion though :)

Andrew