[Engine-devel] Engine local configuration

[Livnat Peer]

On 12/31/2012 05:05 PM, Doron Fediuck wrote:
> 
> ----- Original Message -----
>> From: "Juan Hernandez" <jhernand at redhat.com>
>> To: "Roy Golan" <rgolan at redhat.com>
>> Cc: engine-devel at ovirt.org
>> Sent: Friday, December 14, 2012 1:25:57 PM
>> Subject: Re: [Engine-devel] Error on starting webadmin
>>
>> On 12/13/2012 03:55 PM, Roy Golan wrote:
>>> On 12/13/2012 04:49 PM, Vojtech Szocs wrote:
>>>>> this is making the contribution process more complex. lets think
>>>>> of a
>>>>> lighter way to get a developing setup.
>>>> I agree, I just wanted to have the local Engine configuration
>>>> steps documented for reference.. If there's a better way to do
>>>> it, I'm for it.
>>>>
>>>> Vojtech
>>>
>>> having LocalConfig look for "engine.conf.defaults" system property
>>> before fallback to System.getenv("ENGINE_DEFAULTS");
>>>   +  concatenating
>>>   -Dengine.conf.defaults=$HOME/.engine.conf.defaults
>>> to  JAVA_OPTS  on standalone.conf
>>
>> How is the system property simpler than the environment variable?
>>
>> I agree that this makes the development process a bit more complex at
>> the moment, but I think that the way to make it simpler is not to
>> continue adding things to standalone.conf. I think that we should
>> move
>> towards a development environment that is closer to the production
>> environment, not the other way around. Ideally the developer should
>> be
>> able to do something like "make install" to have the engine deployed
>> to
>> a directory structure similar to what he have in the production
>> environment. Then you should be able to go to the bin directory
>> inside
>> that structure and start the engine (and the other tools) using the
>> same
>> script that we use in production environments. If we achieve this
>> goal
>> then we have a simple development environment setup and also we have
>> all
>> developers testing almost the same thing that will go into the
>> production environments. At the moment we don't have that, most times
>> you are testing something quite different (in terms of directory
>> structure, configuration, etc) to what will be installed in
>> production
>> environments. I am working in that direction.
>>
> 
> Hi Guys,
> Sorry to resume this discussion, but I find the current situation 
> unfriendly to most developers. I understand there's a need for
> specific configurations, but it seems to me that this has taken
> one step too far for most developers.
> 
> Further more, I expect to see such fundamental concepts being
> initially discussed here, and not settle with a technical ack,
> only to be a part of a thread called: "Error on starting webadmin".
> In this context I expect the verified flag to mean "This was
> discussed and verified with contributers in the relevant list".
> 

Hi Doron,
Thanks for bringing this on the list, I agree with everything you wrote
and could not put it any better myself.

I configured an environment from scratch yesterday and the additional
step to have this config file in /etc does not feel right, not to
mentioned that this is not documented in the wiki installation page.

I think one of the guidelines we kept so far for setting a development
environment and making it as easy as possible for new developers is that
no manual step is needed on top of using the setup profile and this
definitely breaks this assumption (at least with the way it is handled
today).

> My use case is exactly what Juan describes, but I think the resolution
> should be different. ie- contributers should be able to git clone
> and once they setup jboss & postgres they should be able to have
> something running.
> 
> We cannot assume /etc is a location contributers can access. Think
> of university students who would like to see how ovirt works using
> university's machines. In the past they may have had issues with
> JBoss, but that's already handled by profiles. So there's really
> no need for oVirt to ask them more than that. I know UI plugins
> are using this infra, but remember that the plugins are completely
> optional and should not block basic operation.
> 
> Some more concerns this issue raises are related to release versions;
> What happens when we need to support more than one jboss and/or
> release version?
> 
> So here are 2 options we should consider in order to allow local
> config without additional requirements:
> 
> 1. Use defaults.
> System should boot and start in whichever way we decide without
> anything else needed. Local configuration can override these
> defaults if it exists, but it should simply work.

The engine.conf.defaults holds default values for the keys, so I guess
that by defaults you mean a way to have this file as part of our
deploying | setup process and only for overriding values we should use
/etc/sysconfig/ovirt-engine, which seems to be the original intention of
the writer (according to the file documentation), I wonder where it went
wrong...

> 
> 2. Use local JBoss profile.
> Have everything we need in my-standalone.conf and start running jboss
> with a local profile. This conf file may be generated or copied once
> when running mvn -Psetup 
> 
> We can also inject the relevant environment variables to the global
> standalone.conf as we do for debugging, but this cannot be used in
> the students use case, unless we have host-level config.
> 
> I know many are still in vacation due to the holidays, so we should
> wait for a few more days before making a final decision. Still feel
> free to ack / nack / suggest your own.
> 
> Doron 
>