[Pulp-list] Importer Sync APIs

[Nick Coghlan]

On 11/22/2011 07:43 AM, Jay Dobies wrote:
> I also know there are at least two other teams interested in writing
> plugins that I'd like to give some feedback on how this will meet their
> needs.

I just hit something that's a user-friendliness problem: the content 
free nature of the "validate_config" boolean result. Currently, there's 
no mechanism to report to a user detailed information on *why* their 
configuration failed.

So, there's two pieces of feedback coming from this:

1. From *all* the plugin methods, it would be good to be able to gain 
access to an appropriately scoped Python logger. Perhaps this can be 
made an API on the Importer and Distributor base classes? Something like:

     def get_logger(self):
         logger_name = "pulp.plugins." + type(self).__module__
         return logging.getLogger(logger_name)

2. It would be good to have a richer return value from validate_config() 
that allows a plugin to supply an error message to be displayed to the 
user. I think the simplest way to go on that front is to make the return 
value from validate_config() an error message string, with a return 
value of "None" used to indicate that no error occurred and the 
configuration is fine.

You could probably do something fancier by using exceptions, but "error 
message or None" seems to cover all the important aspects.

Cheers,
Nick.

-- 
Nick Coghlan
Red Hat Engineering Operations, Brisbane