[ClusterLabs] Proposal for machine-friendly output from Pacemaker tools

[Kristoffer Grönlund]

On Mon, 2019-01-07 at 17:52 -0600, Ken Gaillot wrote:
> There has been some discussion in the past about generating more
> machine-friendly output from pacemaker CLI tools for scripting and
> high-level interfaces, as well as possibly adding a pacemaker REST
> API.
> 
> I've filed an RFE BZ
> 
>  https://bugs.clusterlabs.org/show_bug.cgi?id=5376
> 
> to design an output interface that would suit these goals. An actual
> REST API is not planned at this point, but this would provide a key
> component of any future implementation.

Having all the tools able to produce XML output like cibadmin and
crm_mon would be good in general, I think. So that seems like a good
proposal to me.

In the case of an error, at least in my experience just getting a
return code and stderr output is enough to make sense of it - getting
XML on stderr in the case of an error wouldn't seem like something that
would add much value to me.

Cheers,
Kristoffer

> 
> The question is what machine-friendly output should look like. The
> basic idea is: for commands like "crm_resource --constraints" or
> "stonith_admin --history", what output format would be most useful
> for
> a GUI or other program to parse?
> 
> Suggestions welcome here and/or on the bz ...