CLI Tools

[Brad Bishop]

On Thu, Jul 25, 2019 at 11:06:13AM +0930, Andrew Jeffery wrote:
>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.

Years ago when Patrick wrote the referenced note, the belief was that 
the OpenBMC DBus API would be stable.  But that thinking has long since 
been rejected - the OpenBMC DBus is not stable and as such it probably 
doesn't make sense to be sharing it (via busctl commands) with our 
users?

>
>Having said that some of these already have shortcuts, such as
>
># systemctl stop host-failure-reboots at 0

It might already be too late, but we probably should not have presented 
systemctl commands as stable interfaces for our users either, for the 
same reasons as I've mentioned above.

>
>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