Date: Mon, 5 Mar 2012 15:21:03 +0100
From: Natanael Copa <ncopa@alpinelinux.org>
To: Jim Pryor <lists+alpine-devel@jimpryor.net>
Cc: alpine-devel@lists.alpinelinux.org
Subject: Re: [alpine-devel] Understanding alpine-setup
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On Mon, 05 Mar 2012 05:03:34 -0500
Jim Pryor <lists+alpine-devel@jimpryor.net> wrote:

> > I have been thinking of rewriting the setup-* scripts in lua. There
> > have been need for unattended installs and better setup-disk script.
> > There was some unattended patches that i let in but I'm not 100%
> > happy with that implementation (and have personally neer used it).
> ...
> > Anyways... The reason that I haven't put more effort in cleaning up
> > the setup-* scripts is that I think the long time solution is to
> > make something in Lua. I just have not had the time to actually
> > implement it yet.
> 
> Thanks for your replies Natanael. Can you tell me where to look for
> any earlier discussion of your dissatisfaction with the current setup
> scripts?

It is probably who are mostly dissatisfied so this is something I have
been thinking for a while.

I searched the email archive and there have various discussions on how
to implement unattended installs. I mention Lua here:
http://lists.alpinelinux.org/alpine-devel/0957.html

I think it has been mentioned in IRC some time that it would have been
nice to integrate the setup-* scripts with ACF better. After all they
do partially same job.
 
> Lua *is* a terrific and small-footprint language to use if something
> stronger than ash is needed. But to my novice eyes the existing
> scripts already look like a pretty good system.

Ok, thanks for this feedback. Very nice to hear this from someone who
have read the code and actually understands it :)

Yes, it does the job. We could improve the framework (I cloned some of
the functions from the openbsd installer functions and used them in
setup-vs-guest script:

http://git.alpinelinux.org/cgit/aports/tree/main/util-vserver/setup-vs-guest

But while working on all those scripts I have various times thought
that the shell things are a bit clumsy, and I miss arrays/hashtables.
Specially for things like setup-apkrepos, setup-interfaces and
setup-disk. I already have a lua moule in progress for parsing /sys and
fishing out disk and partition info in convenient data structures. Bash
is way to big be considered (it doesnt help that its slow either).

I must admit that using shell if possible is a good thing. I just feel
that we are at the limit where something stronger is wanted.

> Maybe needing some
> tweaks, but also quite flexible. Doesn't the "answerfile"
> functionality already do this, for instance:
> 
> > The idea is that you could provide a file with all or parts of the
> > info and only get prompted of the missing stuff.

It does. But I'm not too happy with the implementation. It was a bolted
on as an "afterthought".

It could of course be a "not-invented-by-me" syndrome :)

What I had in mind was something like a JSON file that holds the
answers:

{
  "hostname": "myalpine",
  "keyboard": "en",
  "timezone": "UTC",
  "interfaces": {
     "eth0": { "method": "static", .... }.
     "eth1": { "method": "dhcp" }
  },
  ...
}

This is very convenient with Lua.

Also, the idea is also to at some point have a GTK ui for this. Would
be nice to use same backend.

I guess this is was what ACF was originally supposed to do but ended up
as way too web (and html) centric.

Actually, ACF grew out from "we need to manage Alpine boxes via web and
we need to do it *now*". There was a thought that it should be a
general purpose configuration framework but ended up as a more or less
web only thing.

The setup-* scripts on the other hand grew out from "i want my alpine
box up and run as quick as possible" for development.

> My main difficulty was the thin documentation, and not having a good
> overview of how all the pieces fit together. I've now made a variety
> of small wiki commits to help improve this for others. And the dense
> new page I already mentioned,
> <http://wiki.alpinelinux.org/wiki/Alpine_Setup_Scripts>.
 
Very nice! Even if we switch to Lua, we need to be backward
compatible with the current script, at least to certain degree. So
those docs are definitively a keeper - and they were badly needed.

Now, I don't think we need decide what to do with setup-* scripts right
now. We have a feature freeze around 1 april and there is no chance that
we will reach implement setup-* in Lua before that so we need to polish
our current scripts and get the thing out. In other words: same as last
N release iterations...

Again, thanks!

-nc


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