[Xen-tools] Re: [Xen-devel] [PATCH] rework xen/xm/main.py to be more straight forward

[Mark Williamson <mark.williamson@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

> #3 has the nice side-effect of ensuring that xmlib is completely
> documented which makes xmlib the perfect python interface for management
> tools.  It would be even nicer if the arguments were expanded instead of
> passed as a list so the functions could be called in a more natural way.

Just remembered what else I was going to say earlier:

If you do: function_name(*arg_list) it'll expand the list into separate args, 
so you can do exactly that.

(side note: a "**" will cause a dictionary to be expanded into a list of 
multiple named arguments)

See, Python Is Your Friend :-)

Cheers,
Mark

> A short help can be autogenerated by only grabbing the first sentence of
> __doc__.
>
> Aliases could be supported with module-level variables assigned to the
> function they alias.  However, I don't like aliases so I'd just not do
> anything.
>
> One thing this would break is abbrevation but I'm quite sure Mark is the
> only one using them :-)
>
> Regards,
>
> Anthony Liguori
>
> Sean Dague wrote:
> >The following patch is a major restructuring of main.py to be more
> > straight forward, and remove as much code as possible.  It does a number
> > of things:
> >
> >* It implements the standardized options proposed via my RFC for xm
> >* It restructures the calling of these functions to be function pointers
> > out of a dictionary, instead of subclasses found through inspection * It
> > consolidates all help info, making it easier to see that the help screen
> > looks consistent across commands
> >* It moves object importing into the functions that require them only,
> >  allowing commands like "xm help" to be runable as non root
> >* It adds command aliasing to provide backwards compatibility with many
> >  commands (i.e. xm balloon)
> >* It provides more useful error messages is most fail cases
> >* It implements a short help by default (which takes < 24 screen lines) as
> >  requested by Mark W at OLS
> >* It attempts to trap more exceptions than before and provide useful
> > errors based on them (this requires more testing)
> >
> >It also has the added benefit of dropping the total size of main.py from
> >935 lines to 694 lines.
> >
> >This patch makes no changes to any other elements of xen/xm, and works
> > with all other objects and libraries as is.

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