Bug #8162
Cloud Pack should have no required options
| Status: | Accepted | Start date: | 06/30/2011 | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Priority: | Low | Due date: | ||
| Assignee: | - | % Done: | 0% | |
| Category: | cloudpack | Spent time: | - | |
| Target version: | - | |||
| Keywords: | cloudpack | Branch: | ||
Description
Overview¶
The phrases “required option” and “mandatory option” are oxymorons in and of themselves. As the number of these type of CLI options increase, the time required for an end user to “do stuff” with cloud pack also increases. The end user needs to figure out how to satisfy all of the mandatory option requirements.
Documentation will help, but from an usability standpoint I think the ideal situation is to have no required options whatsoever.
For this ticket, the following options should be made truly optional:
puppet node create--platform--image--type--keypair
puppet node bootstraperr: The following options are required: platform, image, image, type, keypair, login, login, login, keyfile, installer_payload, installer_answers, node_group, node_group err: Try 'puppet help node bootstrap' for usage
puppet node init- Not sure what this action expects:
err: puppet node init takes 1 argument, but you gave 0
Recommendation¶
Cloud Pack should have it’s own configuration file and an action to write settings to this configuration file. This could be as simple as a YAML file with a hash that’s merged with the command line options for each action. This will be filed as two related but separate tickets.
Related issues
History
#1
Updated by Daniel Pittman almost 2 years ago
Bug #8162: Cloud Pack should have no required options
The phrases “required option” and “mandatory option” are oxymorons in and of themselves. As the number of these type of CLI options increase, the time required for an end user to “do stuff” with cloud pack also increases. The end user needs to figure out how to satisfy all of the mandatory option requirements.
These are mandatory choices that the user must make. The only possible alternative is that they are all strictly positionally sensitive, and get much, much, much less useful help. As in, something like this:
] puppet cloudything $platform $image $type # oops, forgot
$keypair at the end
cloudything takes four arguments, but you gave three, sorry.
] puppet cloudything $platform $type $image $keypair
... time passes, stuff happens ...
boom! Sorry, $type is not a valid EC2 image, please try again.
Documentation will help, but from an usability standpoint I think the ideal situation is to have no required options whatsoever.
These are choices that absolutely must be made, and can’t be guessed.
They have to be provided somewhere; options are the least worst choice for that.
#2
Updated by Jeff McCune almost 2 years ago
Daniel Pittman wrote:
Bug #8162: Cloud Pack should have no required options
The phrases “required option” and “mandatory option” are oxymorons in and of themselves. As the number of these type of CLI options increase, the time required for an end user to “do stuff” with cloud pack also increases. The end user needs to figure out how to satisfy all of the mandatory option requirements.
These are mandatory choices that the user must make. The only possible alternative is that they are all strictly positionally sensitive, and get much, much, much less useful help. As in, something like this:
I agree with you that the user must make these choices at least once.
What I’m trying to propose in this ticket is one of many possible alternative allowing the user to make them once and only once rather than on every invocation of the command line interface.
Does that make sense?
#3
Updated by Jeff McCune almost 2 years ago
- Priority changed from Normal to Low
#4
Updated by James Turnbull almost 2 years ago
- Status changed from Unreviewed to Accepted
#5
Updated by Nigel Kersten almost 2 years ago
- Category set to cloudpack