openstack team mailing list archive

[Adam Spiers <aspiers@xxxxxxxx>]

Dean Troyer (dtroyer@xxxxxxxxx) wrote:
> We had a good discussion about a unified OpenStack command line client
> on Monday at the Design Summit.  The notes are in the Etherpad at
> http://etherpad.openstack.org/FolsumCLI, I summarized my recollection
> at the bottom; those who were there feel free to add the bits I
> missed.
> 
> One of the first things to do is to find out who is interested in
> contributing to this project.and hopefully coordinating some of the
> work with the other emerging project-specific clients.  Send me an
> email and I'll build a list to get the discussion started.

I missed the session but I'm interested in this and should be able to
contribute a few opinions at the very least, and hopefully some
commits too (I'm already working on unifying help output across
various commands).

> We also should look for some consensus on the name of the command
> itself.  'oscli' is a placeholder, and while sufficiently short and
> unique for my tastes it is hard to pronounce and remember.  The
> leading candidates I have heard at the summit so far are 'openstack'
> and 'stack'.  Let's gather some feedback at the bottom of the Etherpad
> about this as I am sure there are other opinions out there.

I have added my votes, tidied up the voting text in the etherpad (it
was a little unclear which were total vote counts vs. individual
votes), and suggested another possibility: 'ost', although FWIW I
prefer 'openstack' which is unambiguous, obvious, and unforgettable.
Bearing in mind Murphy's Law, whatever 3- or 4-letter abbreviation you
choose, there's a chance it's already been claimed for some other
purpose in at least one environment somewhere :-)  For example, in an
Ubuntu world, someone might really like 'osc' because it's fast to
type and fairly easy to remember ("OpenStack CLI") ... but in a SUSE
world, that would be full of fail because osc is already heavily used
as the CLI for the Open Build Service.  So keeping it as 'openstack'
would allow Ubuntu folk (in this example) to do 'alias osc=openstack'
and SUSE folk to do (say) 'alias ost=openstack'.

Thanks!
Adam