Discussion of Fedora Server use-cases

[Stephen Gallagher]

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On 10/30/2013 09:30 AM, "Jóhann B. Guðmundsson" wrote:
> 
> On 10/30/2013 12:47 PM, Stephen Gallagher wrote:
>> I agree with this completely, and it's one of the principal
>> drivers of the OpenLMI project[1] (full disclosure: I'm heavily
>> involved in this effort).
>> 
>> Under the hood, we have abstracted large amounts of the
>> underlying subsystems of the Linux system into a set of CIM
>> object models and exposed them as a stable API. We've then gone
>> and built a scripting environment (using the python language;
>> nothing new to learn like PowerShell) and cli "meta-command"
>> builder[2].
>> 
>> Right now, we don't have any public GUI consuming this interface 
>> because our research among Red Hat's customers strongly indicated
>> that real-world administrators care more about a scriptable
>> interface than they do a GUI. That's not to say that there is
>> zero interest in such a GUI, but that it's secondary to getting
>> day-to-day, repetitive tasks done.
>> 
>> Also, to head off some of the NIH concerns that may be in your
>> mind after reading the earlier discussion about the
>> system-config-* UIs, the OpenLMI project is currently being
>> developed jointly by several companies, led by Red Hat but with
>> contributors from Dell, SUSE and others.
> 
> I'm not foreseeing anyone around these parts deploy and use the
> CIM behemoth after I attended the presentation of it devconf brno
> this year.
> 

CIM was a behemoth, but we think that the new scripting interface
we've built atop it simplifies it greatly. We've made a lot of
progress on it in the last year.


> Maybe to much learning curve and training for to little
> infrastructure to make it worth while, had a part in reaching that
> conclusion as well as fact I think it got mentioned on that
> presentation that there was cross OS interoperability issues with
> it ( if memory servers me correct ).
> 

The learning curve of CIM is very high, but we're trying very hard to
solve that problem in the lmishell python interface. It's
significantly simplified, while still having the ability to talk to
all of the complex capabilities as well.

As far as cross-os compatibility, the only concern is that older OSes
(such as RHEL 6) will only get a subset of the capabilities because we
use more modern interfaces. Some work is being done to backport a very
large subset, though.

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