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.
