Mailinglist Archive: yast-devel (129 mails)

[Lukas Ocilka <lukas.ocilka@xxxxxxx>]

Klaus Kaempf napsal(a):
> * Justin Haygood <jhaygood@xxxxxxxxxxx> [Nov 15. 2007 19:06]:
> > From experience, SCRs are just plain hard to use unless you are a rocket 
> > scientist. Writing and consuming SCRs (or their potential replacement) 
> > should be a lot easier and more "fun". 
>
> Agreed !
>
> And I forgot one more point in my list:
>
> - Object orientation
>   The 'backend api' should pick up properties of object-orientation.
>   Examples:
>   
>   Old                                 New
>   ---                                 ---
>   value = SCR::Read( .foo.bar )   ->  value = client.foo.bar
>   SCR::Write( .foo.bar, value )   ->  client.foo.bar = value
>   SCR::Execute( .foo.bar, v1, v2) ->  client.foo.bar( v1, v2 )
>   
> I think this fulfills the 'easy' and 'fun' requirements ;-)

Sounds great!

Nevertheless I don't see *any* benefit when comparing to the current
implementation. What I see are these drawbacks:

* Broken backward compatibility - and we know we need backward
  compatibility in such important tasks as access to system is.
  We just can't rewrite the whole YaST overnight (OES, SLEPOS, ...).

* Confuses developers - currently we have clearly written: 'Read',
  'Write', 'Execute' or 'Dir'.
  The proposal of replacement for SCR::Read vs. SCR::Execute is almost
  the same:

  any cmd_out = client.foo.bar ( v1 )
  any value   = client.foo.bar

  any cmd_out = SCR::Execute (.foo.bar, v1)
  any value   = SCR::Read (.foo.bar)

* It's not a fun to rewrite all the existing code :) ;) and it's not
  easy either! ;)

The current SCR implementation expects caching the changed values, all
are written to disk at once to make it faster. I don't see any clear
/object-oriented/ syntax to rewrite it to be still understandable.

Anyway, if we are talking about SCR -> 'client', WFM would need to be
'system' or something similar. Which, on the other hand, would bring
another confusedness.

IMO: All in all, this is not worth changing. But please, convince me it is.

Bye
Lukas

PS: The current documentation of SCR agents is generated from sources
for every release. See these pages, for instance:

SCR:
http://forgeftp.novell.com/yast/doc/SL10.3/scr/index.html
http://forgeftp.novell.com/yast/doc/SL10.3/scr/136.root.wgetrc.html
http://forgeftp.novell.com/yast/doc/SL10.3/scr/152.sysconfig.SuSEfirewall2.html

SCR how-to document:
http://forgeftp.novell.com/yast/doc/SL10.3/tdg/documentation_SCR.html

-- 

Lukas Ocilka, YaST Developer                     (xn--luk-gla45d)
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