Hello Zygmunt,
On Tue, 27 Mar 2012 13:48:30 +0200 Zygmunt Krynicki zygmunt.krynicki@linaro.org wrote:
W dniu 27.03.2012 13:32, Paul Sokolovsky pisze:
Hello,
Yong Qin is working on the blueprint https://blueprints.launchpad.net/lava-android-test/+spec/modify-android-buil... to add arbitrary custom client-side scripts to Android Build. He submitted first implementation of it as https://code.launchpad.net/~liuyq0307/linaro-android-build-tools/run-custom/... and documented as https://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/Android/AndroidBuild-LavaIntegration .
Unfortunately, I'm not thrilled with that implementation, more specifically, its "user interface" (i.e. any parts which user directly faces) by the following reasons:
- The idea behind Android Build's build config was that they're
short and easy for human to parse, essentially one glance-over would enough to get a good idea what is built here, even for outsider. Consequently, the configs should not be overloaded with details not related to building. If there's a need for integration with other systems, we have good pattern of externalizing such details and then just referring to them with a single variable in a build config.
- The whole approach in
https://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/Android/AndroidBuild-LavaIntegration seems like trying to encode hierarchical structure in the shell syntax, which is not much supporting of that. The end result looks pretty much like representation of graph structure in raw assembler
- it's spaghetti mix of data pieces and labels, requiring long time
to wrap hand around to understand it, and cumbersome and error-prone to write.
So, I would like to propose alternative syntax solving the issues above. I probably should start with saying that if the talk is about LAVA, then using native LAVA JSON request immediately comes to mind. Well, I guess human-writability wasn't a design goal for that, so I skip it. It still makes sense to stick to general-purpose hierarchical structure syntax though. Except that JSON has 2 problems: a) it doesn't support comments natively, so we'll need to pre-process it; b) error reporting/localization may be still no ideal.
Hi, just jumping into the conversation briefly to look at small technical aspect. I have not really been tracking this command effort and I don't understand what it's about.
Yeah, me too, I just spent some time reviewing Yong Qin's examples and code. And my main concern about it is external interface/syntax which users face on android-build.linaro.org. I'm ok with any underlying implementation.
On JSON: I think that comment 2 is inaccurate. We have very precise syntax error reporting (down to line/column and text range on some errors) and even better format reporting (the javascript expression that pinpoints the part of json document that does not match the schema, same for the schema actually).
Yes, I meant a bit different thing, let me elaborate:
1. LAVA has API which accepts JSON. You say that you parse that JSON very carefully, that's cool! But that native API syntax unlikely was designed to be easily written by human from scratch, right? 2. So, let us on android-build side (could be reused if proved successful) to develop another, deliberately human-optimized syntax, and let it be still based on JSON. 3. Then, android-build side script will a) read such human-friendly test def (example: https://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/Android/AndroidBuild-LavaIntegration/pfalco...), b) transform it into native LAVA syntax (essentially, dereference URLs and add machine-readable fields), and c) submit as such. 4. My concern with error reporting and comment support was for 3a step. Well, I just checked that python's json module does down-to-char error reporting, which is cool. And comments can be handled by a simple regexp substitution, so we're all good.
So, with this plan, there won't be any code changes from LAVA team (assuming that running arbitrary test commands already supported by its API), but we'd for sure appreciate sanity and approach review.
Anyway, you have my full support for native json formats. I think that if comments are an issue I can provide a parser that simply ignores comments. We could then keep the human readable documents and strictly machine readable, schema-backed data.
Thanks ZK
Anyway, here's my try, it is presented as a comment to https://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/Android/AndroidBuild-LavaIntegration and then full example at https://wiki.linaro.org/Platform/Android/AndroidBuild-LavaIntegration/pfalco...
Let's discuss if that covers our needs and constraints.
Thanks, Paul
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