openstack team mailing list archive

[Adam Spiers <aspiers@xxxxxxxx>]

Dean Troyer (dtroyer@xxxxxxxxx) wrote:
> On Tue, May 1, 2012 at 1:49 PM, Adam Spiers <aspiers@xxxxxxxx> wrote:
> > Sorry, that made me think of another newbie question - is the
> > intention that all actions (including user- / site- / vendor-specific
> > extensions) *must* be implemented in Python using the client API
> > modules?  Or will it also be able to support extensions simply by
> > dropping arbitrary openstack-ACTION executables on $PATH?  I like the
> > way git lets you do the latter, e.g. I have a bunch of shell scripts
> 
> At this point we have only talked about extending the client via
> cliff-derived plugins.  I'm trying to decide what the value add of
> arbitrary binaries being called is; the way I imagine it the binary
> would have to duplicate the token flow auth at a minimum, why not just
> call it directly?  git has the advantage here of keeping its state in
> the filesystem.  What little state we have is in memory.

True.  I guess I was thinking that the main advantage was being able
to knock something up extremely quickly using shell (and this could
simply reuse the credentials passed to it for multiple invocations of
core openstack commands, potentially at the cost of extra round-trips
to keystone), but even then, all it really buys you is being able to
invoke it as 'openstack my-extension' vs. 'openstack-my-extension' or
any other arbitrary name, which isn't exactly a huge win.  So I'm
happy to park this part of the discussion.