[ClusterLabs] Coming in Pacemaker 2.0.3: crm_mon output changes

[Ken Gaillot]

Hi all,

With Pacemaker 2.0.2, we introduced a new experimental option for XML
output from stonith_admin. This was the test case for a new output
model for Pacemaker tools. I'm happy to say this has been extended to
crm_mon and will be considered stable as of 2.0.3.

crm_mon has always supported text, curses, HTML, and XML output, and
that doesn't change. However the command-line options for those have
been deprecated and replaced with new forms:

Old:                New:
--as-xml            --output-as=xml
--as-html=FILE      --output-as=html --output-to=FILE
--web-cgi           --output-as=html --output-cgi
--disable-ncurses   --output-as=text

The new --output-as and --output-to options are identical to
stonith_admin's, and will eventually be supported by all Pacemaker
tools. Each tool may support a different set of formats; for example,
stonith_admin supports text and xml.

When called with --as-xml, crm_mon's XML output will be identical to
previous versions. When called with the new --output-as=xml option, it
will be slightly different: the outmost element will be a <pacemaker-
result> element, which will be consistent across all tools. The old XML
schema remains documented in crm_mon.rng; the new XML schema will be
documented in an api-result.rng schema that will encompass all tools'
XML output.

Beyond those interface changes, the text output displayed by crm_mon
has been tweaked slightly. It is more organized with list headings and
bullets. Hopefully you will find this easier to read. We welcome any
feedback or suggestions for improvement.

The HTML output gains a new feature as well: it uses CSS throughout,
rather than ancient HTML formatting, and you can provide a custom
stylesheet (via --output-stylesheet-link=URL) to control how the page
looks.

If you are a heavy user of crm_mon, we encourage you to test the new
release (expected later this week) and let us know what you like and
don't like. You don't have to upgrade a whole cluster to test crm_mon;
you can install the new release on a test machine, copy the CIB from
your cluster to it, and run it like: CIB_file=/path/to/copied/cib.xml
crm_mon <options>. That won't work with curses output, but you can test
text, HTML, and XML that way.
-- 
Ken Gaillot <kgaillot at redhat.com>