CLI Tools

[Andrew Jeffery]

On Thu, 25 Jul 2019, at 11:58, Brad Bishop wrote:
> 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?

Yeah, lifting an obmcutil interface to represent something users want to
achieve (`obmcutil dhcp enable`) rather than exposing implementation
details would be a win.

> 
> >
> >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.

Right.

Andrew