[Freeipa-users] CSV support in IPA administration tools - to be, or not to be?

[John Dennis]

On 01/11/2013 03:10 PM, Dmitri Pal wrote:
> On 01/10/2013 11:00 AM, John Dennis wrote:
>> On 01/10/2013 08:15 AM, Petr Spacek wrote:
>>> Hello,
>>>
>>> is there any user of CSV support built-in to IPA administration tools
>>> ("ipa"
>>> command)? Do you consider it sane or even useful? Please reply.
>>
>> I've always disliked our use of CSV values on both the command line
>> and internally. They're just weird, nothing else in Unix works like
>> this and as you point out below there are easier better alternatives.
>> Plus with the use of CSV's there is a lot of awkward quoting in a
>> variety of places.
>>
>> On the command line I always thought multiple values should be
>> specified multiple times and internally they should be encapsulated in
>> lists rather than parsing a CSV string (if it's logically a list then
>> why isn't it a list?)
>>
>> However at this juncture I'm not sure we can make such a change, we
>> have a published API that we would be violating. But perhaps we're not
>> so far down the road we can't make such a change and we're better off
>> doing it now while there is even a chance. It's not clear to me how
>> much the command line is being used and specifically with CSV values.
>>
>> Do I think CSV's are sane and useful? No. Can we change that? That's a
>> whole other story.
>>
>>
>>> I wanted to add single TXT record with double quotation marks (")
>>> inside the
>>> TXT data.
>>>
>>> I spent some time figuring out how it is supposed to work ... and
>>> with help of
>>> Petr^3 I managed to write the command.
>>>
>>> The resulting command (for BASH) is absolutely crazy:
>>> ipa dnsrecord-add example.test. newrec --txt-rec='"""created on
>>> 13:01:23"""'
>>>
>>> Do we really need support for this piece of insanity? Shells can do
>>> the same
>>> thing with much less pain :-)
>>>
>>> IPA with CSV support can add multiple attributes at once, e.g.
>>> ipa dnsrecord-add example.test. newrec --txt-rec=1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9
>>> will add TXT records with value 1, 2, 3 etc.
>>>
>>> BASH can do the same thing (without the escaping hell):
>>> ipa dnsrecord-add example.test. newrec --txt-rec={1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9}
>>> and
>>> ipa dnsrecord-add example.test. newrec --txt-rec={1..9}
>>> BASH would expand to
>>> ipa dnsrecord-add example.test. newrec --txt-rec=1 --txt-rec=2
>>> --txt-rec=3
>>> --txt-rec=4 --txt-rec=5 --txt-rec=6 --txt-rec=7 --txt-rec=8 --txt-rec=9
>>>
>>
>>
> Do we already have CSV support?
> Where is it used?
> It is not clear to me if BASH example above requires the CSV support or
> it does expansion on its own. Please explain.
>

We already have CSV support. It's a mechanism that allows multiple 
values to be passed for one command line argument. The alternate 
approach is rather than having one command line arg that takes multiple 
values is to allow multiple command line args, each one taking a single 
value. This is the UNIX methodology. I believe the original thinking was 
who would want to type out multiple command line args, it's too verbose. 
However the shell expansion illustrated above shows how with simple 
shell syntax one can have succicent args and allow the shell to expand 
them into the preferred verbose form.

-- 
John Dennis <jdennis at redhat.com>

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