Testbed Support for GridPP member institutes
> [mailto:[log in to unmask]] On Behalf Of Ian Stokes-Rees said:
> From what I understand, the python code won't really be
> "hackable", at
> least not in a useful way -- I think the deployment details
> are largely
> (entirely?) embedded in the XML. Can someone confirm or deny this?
Well, it's more that you aren't supposed to need to hack it because the
scripts are supposed to deal with all the possible options and not just
the most common ones. Whether that's really true remains to be seen, so
far it hasn't been used on many sites and most of them have used a
standard setup. The python scripts do contain a lot of "intelligence"
about how to deploy things: the xml isn't rich enough to describe things
in the way that, say, quattor was designed to do. If you look at the xml
it isn't really much more than a set of key-value pairs, although
potentially it has a bit more flexibility, e.g. you can have arrays and
nested structures - with bash you're stuck with something clumsy like
NUM_X=3
X_1=a
X_2=b
X_3=c
which will probably go horribly wrong if you mistype the second one as
X2=b.
> Finally, has anyone stepped back and said "It shouldn't be this
> complicated"?
Yes, I keep saying it, but it doesn't seem to have much effect! I think
part of the problem is that developers are decoupled from deployment,
they only ever deploy things on their own small, controlled test
systems, and few developers ever try to use the production system. The
new SA3 should be a step in the right direction; the people doing
integration will be directly connected to deployment, and developers
won't be able to get their code built at all except through the SA3
system so they will at least have to co-operate with it.
Stephen
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