[ClusterLabs Developers] Resource Agent language discussion

[Digimer]

On 07/08/15 09:36 AM, Jan Pokorný wrote:
> Hello,
> 
> [adding users list as I think there's an overlap]
> 
> On 07/08/15 12:09 +0200, Jehan-Guillaume de Rorthais wrote:
>> Now, I would like to discuss about the language used to write a RA in Pacemaker.
>> I never seen discussion or page about this so far.
> 
> it wasn't in such a "heretic :)" tone, but I tried to show that it
> is extremely hard (if not impossible in some instances) to write
> bullet-proof code in bash (or POSIX shell, for that matter) because
> it's so cumbersome to move from "whitespace-delimited words as
> a single argument" and "words as standalone arguments" back and forth,
> connected with quotation-desired/-counterproductive madness
> (what if one wants to indeed pass quotation marks as legitimate
> characters within the passed value, etc.) few months back:
> 
> http://clusterlabs.org/pipermail/users/2015-May/000403.html
> (even on developers list, but with fewer replies and broken threading:
> http://clusterlabs.org/pipermail/developers/2015-May/000023.html).
> 
>> HINT: I don't want to discuss (neither troll about) what is the best
>> language. I would like to know why **ALL** the RA are written in
>> bash
> 
> I would expect the original influence were the init scripts (as RAs
> are mostly just enriched variants to support more flexible
> configuration and better diagnostics back to the cluster stack),
> which in turn were born having simplicity and ease of debugging
> (maintainability) in mind.
> 
>> and if there's traps (hidden far in ocf-shellfuncs as instance)
>> to avoid if using a different language. And is it acceptable to
>> include new libs for other languages?
> 
> https://github.com/ClusterLabs/resource-agents/blob/v3.9.6/doc/dev-guides/ra-dev-guide.txt#L33
> doesn't make any assumption about the target language beside stating
> what's a common one.
> 
>> We rewrote the RA in perl, mostly because of me. I was bored with bash/sh
>> limitations AND syntax AND useless code complexity for some easy tasks AND traps
>> (return code etc). In my opinion, bash/sh are fine if you RA code is short
>> and simple. Which was mostly the case back in the time of heartbeat which was
>> stateless only. But it became a nightmare with multi-state agents struggling
>> with complexe code to fit with Pacemaker behavior. Have a look to the mysql or
>> pgsql agents.
>>
>> Moreover, with bash, I had some weird behaviors (timeouts) from the RA between
>> runuser/su/sudo and systemd/pamd some months ago. The three of them have system
>> implications or side effects deep in the system you need to take care off. Using
>> a language able to seteuid/setuid after forking is much more natural and clean
>> to drop root privileges and start the daemon (PostgreSQL refuses to start as
>> root and is not able to drop its privileges to another system user itself).
> 
> Other disadvantage of shell scripts is that frequently many processes
> are spawned for simple changes within the filesystem and for string
> parsing/reformatting, which in turn creates a dependency on plenty
> of external executables.
> 
>> Now, we are far to have a enterprise class certified code, our RA had its
>> very first tests passed successfully yesterday, but here is a quick feedback.
>> The downside of picking another language than bash/sh is that there is no
>> OCF module/library available for them. This is quite inconvenient when you need
>> to get system specifics variables or logging shortcut only defined in
>> ocf-shellfuncs (and I would guess patched by packagers ?).
>>
>> As instance, I had to "capture" values of $HA_SBIN_DIR and $HA_RSCTMP from my
>> perl code.
> 
> There could be a shell wrapper that would put these values into the
> environment and then executed the target itself for its disposal
> (generic solution for arbitrary executable).  That's not applicable
> for "procedural knowledge" (logging, etc.), though, as you mention
> below.
> 
>> Another exemple, our perl RA is only logging to syslog presently. We
>> will probably have to rewrite the ocf_log/ha_log/ha_debug in perl
>> before publishing the final code. Any tip about this ?
>>
>> At some point, to have a clean, portable and OS agnostic code, I wonder how
>> much code we will have to port from ocf-shellfuncs to perl...

Allow me to add, uselessly;

perl! <3

-- 
Digimer
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