BIND segway -> python -> first-class ports

[Alfred Perlstein]

On 12/8/13 4:52 PM, Darren Pilgrim wrote:
> On 12/8/2013 11:02 AM, Alfred Perlstein wrote:
>> So if I were going to task the talented Devin Teske with something,
>> remember you just asked my opinion, then it would be to look at
>> putting Lua in the boot loader, getting python into base, or working
>> on making our utilities be able to output standard machine readable
>> formats such as yaml, XML and json.
>
> Can you cite a real-world example of a general-purpose OS where this 
> was beneficial?  Beneficial here means otherwise impossible 
> functionality or automation gains without adding barriers for 
> low-level diagnostics, tuning, corner-case configurations and other 
> modes of advanced control.
>
> I'm not trolling here; I'd really like to see one.
>
I don't understand your definition of "beneficial", seriously it does 
not make sense to me such that I can't even aspire to fulfill that 
definition.

My definition of beneficial would be anything that reduces the amount of 
code needed to get information out of the system, reduces error, reduces 
code, reduces duplication, and in general makes the system more plug and 
play.

I gave a talk recently at Bay LISA where I described this and a few of 
the devops people in the audience really seemed interested.

Do you know how frustrating it is to parse the output of ifconfig? 
sysctl?  gpart?  etc, etc.  Why not just emit it in a machine friendly 
form and then immediately plug it into whatever system you are gathering 
the information for.

Are you writing a web app and you need to get a few fields from vmstat?

Are you graphing the output of iostat?

Are you doing anything at a higher level than just the command line?

Do you not think that it is just plain silly that we have on the order 
of hundreds (if not thousands) of lines of code to "pretty print" from 
our cli tools, however no code to "machine print" from them?

Do you know that JUNOS has xml output from numerous utilities just to 
make scripting easier?  (say what you will about XML, but it's *something*).

Anyhow, I hope that makes sense.

-Alfred