[Freeipa-devel] Command instantiation

[John Dennis]

On 01/14/2013 12:56 PM, Jan Cholasta wrote:
> On 14.1.2013 18:50, Petr Viktorin wrote:
>> Ah, yes, you've discovered my ultimate goal: rewriting the whole
>> framefork :)
>
> It would seem we share the same ultimate goal, sir! :-)

Well it's reassuring I'm not alone in my frustration with elements of 
the framework. I thought it was just me :-)

I have one other general complaint about the framework:

Too much magic!

What do I mean by magic? Things which spring into existence at run time 
for which there is no static definition. I've spent (wasted) significant 
amounts of time trying to figure out how something gets instantiated and 
initialized. These things don't exist in the static code, you can't 
search for them because they are synthetic. You can see these things 
being referenced but you'll never find a class definition or __init__() 
method or assignment to a specific object attribute. It's all very very 
clever but at the same time very obscure. If you just use the framework 
in a cookie-cutter fashion this has probably never bothered you, but if 
you have modify what the framework provides it can be difficult.

But I don't want to carp on the framework too much without giving credit 
to Jason first. His mandate was to produce a pluggable framework that 
was robust, extensible, and supported easy plugin authorship. Jason was 
dedicated, almost maniacal in his attention to detail and best 
practices. He also had to design most of this himself (the rest of the 
team was heads down on other things at the time). It has mostly stood 
the test of time. It's pretty hard to anticipate the pain points, that's 
something only experience with system can give you down the road, which 
is where we find ourselves now.

-- 
John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com>

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