The new version of the urfave/cli library is moving to generics, and
it's completely unclear to me why this is an improvement. Their new API
is very complicated to understand, which for me, defeats the purpose of
golang.
In parallel, I needed to do some upcoming cli API refactoring, so this
was a good time to look into new libraries. After a review of the
landscape, I found the alexflint/go-arg library which has a delightfully
elegant API. It does have a few rough edges, but it's otherwise very
usable, and I think it would be straightforward to add features and fix
issues.
Thanks Alex!
The original string interpolation was based on hil which didn't allow
proper escaping, since they used a different escape pattern. Secondly,
the golang Unquote function didn't deal with the variable substitution,
which meant it had to be performed in a second step.
Most importantly, because we did this partial job in Unquote (the fact
that is strips the leading and trailing quotes tricked me into thinking
I was done with interpolation!) it was impossible to remedy the
remaining parts in a second pass with hil. Both operations needs to be
done in a single step. This is logical when you aren't tunnel visioned.
This patch replaces both of these so that string interpolation works
properly. This removes the ability to allow inline function calls in a
string, however this was an incidental feature, and it's not clear that
having it is a good idea. It also requires you wrap the var name with
curly braces. (They are not optional.)
This comes with a load of tests, but I think I got some of it wrong,
since I'm quite new at ragel. If you find something, please say so =D In
any case, this is much better than the original hil implementation, and
easy for a new contributor to patch to make the necessary fixes.
Since we focus on safety, it would be nice to reduce the chance of any
runtime errors if we made a typo for a resource parameter. With this
patch, each resource can export constants into the global namespace so
that typos would cause a compile error.
Of course in the future if we had a more advanced type system, then we
could support precise types for each individual resource param, but in
an attempt to keep things simple, we'll leave that for another day. It
would add complexity too if we ever wanted to store a parameter
externally.
Lastly, we might consider adding "special case" parsing so that directly
specified fields would parse intelligently. For example, we could allow:
file "/tmp/hello" {
state => exists, # magic sugar!
}
This isn't supported for now, but if it works after all the other parser
changes have been made, it might be something to consider.
This might be slightly controversial, in that you must specify the state
if a file would need to be created to perform the action. We no longer
implicitly assume that just specifying content is enough. As it turns
out, I believe this is safer and more correct. The code to implement
this turns out to be much more logical and simplified, and does this
removes an ambiguous corner case from the reversed resource code.
Some discussion in: https://github.com/purpleidea/mgmt/issues/540
This patch also does a bit of related cleanup.
It was a bit awkward using `mgmt run lang --lang <input>` so instead, we
now drop the --lang, and read the positional argv for the input.
This also does the same for the --yaml frontend.
This is a giant cleanup of the etcd code. The earlier version was
written when I was less experienced with golang.
This is still not perfect, and does contain some races, but at least
it's a decent base to start from. The automatic elastic clustering
should be considered an experimental feature. If you need a more
battle-tested cluster, then you should manage etcd manually and point
mgmt at your existing cluster.
This enables imports in mcl code, and is one of last remaining blockers
to using mgmt. Now we can start writing standalone modules, and adding
standard library functions as needed. There's still lots to do, but this
was a big missing piece. It was much harder to get right than I had
expected, but I think it's solid!
This unfortunately large commit is the result of some wild hacking I've
been doing for the past little while. It's the result of a rebase that
broke many "wip" commits that tracked my private progress, into
something that's not gratuitously messy for our git logs. Since this was
a learning and discovery process for me, I've "erased" the confusing git
history that wouldn't have helped. I'm happy to discuss the dead-ends,
and a small portion of that code was even left in for possible future
use.
This patch includes:
* A change to the cli interface:
You now specify the front-end explicitly, instead of leaving it up to
the front-end to decide when to "activate". For example, instead of:
mgmt run --lang code.mcl
we now do:
mgmt run lang --lang code.mcl
We might rename the --lang flag in the future to avoid the awkward word
repetition. Suggestions welcome, but I'm considering "input". One
side-effect of this change, is that flags which are "engine" specific
now must be specified with "run" before the front-end name. Eg:
mgmt run --tmp-prefix lang --lang code.mcl
instead of putting --tmp-prefix at the end. We also changed the GAPI
slightly, but I've patched all code that used it. This also makes things
consistent with the "deploy" command.
* The deploys are more robust and let you deploy after a run
This has been vastly improved and let's mgmt really run as a smart
engine that can handle different workloads. If you don't want to deploy
when you've started with `run` or if one comes in, you can use the
--no-watch-deploy option to block new deploys.
* The import statement exists and works!
We now have a working `import` statement. Read the docs, and try it out.
I think it's quite elegant how it fits in with `SetScope`. Have a look.
As a result, we now have some built-in functions available in modules.
This also adds the metadata.yaml entry-point for all modules. Have a
look at the examples or the tests. The bulk of the patch is to support
this.
* Improved lang input parsing code:
I re-wrote the parsing that determined what ran when we passed different
things to --lang. Deciding between running an mcl file or raw code is
now handled in a more intelligent, and re-usable way. See the inputs.go
file if you want to have a look. One casualty is that you can't stream
code from stdin *directly* to the front-end, it's encapsulated into a
deploy first. You can still use stdin though! I doubt anyone will notice
this change.
* The scope was extended to include functions and classes:
Go forth and import lovely code. All these exist in scopes now, and can
be re-used!
* Function calls actually use the scope now. Glad I got this sorted out.
* There is import cycle detection for modules!
Yes, this is another dag. I think that's #4. I guess they're useful.
* A ton of tests and new test infra was added!
This should make it much easier to add new tests that run mcl code. Have
a look at TestAstFunc1 to see how to add more of these.
As usual, I'll try to keep these commits smaller in the future!
This is a giant refactor to move functions into a hierarchial module
layout. While this isn't entirely implemented yet, it should work
correctly once all the import bits have landed. What's broken at the
moment is the template function, which currently doesn't understand the
period separator.
This is an initial implementation of the mgmt language. It is a
declarative (immutable) functional, reactive, domain specific
programming language. It is intended to be a language that is:
* safe
* powerful
* easy to reason about
With these properties, we hope this language, and the mgmt engine will
allow you to model the real-time systems that you'd like to automate.
This also includes a number of other associated changes. Sorry for the
large size of this patch.
