[Beaker-devel] External tasks proposal up on beaker-project.org

Nick Coghlan ncoghlan at redhat.com
Wed Nov 27 04:40:19 UTC 2013


I decided it made more sense to publish Bill's external tasks library on
beaker-project.org and start a thread here, rather than continue to
conduct the high level design discussions in the Gerrit review.

Firstly, I like the idea of "fetch" and "rpm" nodes in the task XML. The
proposal should be more explicit about the fact that the RPM node is
only present in the recipe XML when it is retrieved through the stable
harness API, and not in other cases (such as when cloning a job).

I *don't* like the way the proposal refers to *removing* the task
library. The task library isn't going anywhere, we're just providing a
way to bypass it when doing so makes sense. The task library is still an
incredibly convenient way to publish utilities like the standard tasks
(http://beaker-project.org/docs/user-guide/beaker-provided-tasks.html),
and potentially future higher level utilities like properly configured
KDC, LDAP and qpid servers.

Finally, I'd prefer it if the proposal was backed by a core
"/distribution/gitfetch" task, together with the ability to flag a task
in the task library as "external". When a task was flagged as external,
then Beaker would *require* that a "fetch" element exist, and would
display that URL when appropriate. Given the UI issues in the Beaker
0.15 upgrade, I'm concerned about breaking the fundamental assumption of
every task being associated with an entry in the task library. By using
an "external" flag and an implied task name (instead of leaving the task
library reference NULL), it changes the failure mode from failing to
handle an unexpected NULL or None value to display the task name as
usual rather than the desired URL details.

Regards,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan
Red Hat Hosted & Shared Services
Software Engineering & Development, Brisbane

Testing Solutions Team Lead
Beaker Development Lead (http://beaker-project.org/)


More information about the Beaker-devel mailing list