Proposal for change pbench-agent "commands" to a unified Python3 based interface

[portante]

Today we have:

$ pbench-register-tool-set ...
$ pbench-user-benchmark
$ pbench-move-results
$ pbench-list-tools
...

Let's replacing with a command like:

$ pbench register toolset
$ pbench register tool
$ pbench move results
$ pbench list tools

Not sure about pbench-user-benchmark, pbench-run-benchmark, or pbench-fio, etc.

[mnmehta]

It makes sense to me to have a top level pbench command and many subcommands below it, but for the sake of consistency I would want to see that across the board (i.e. including pbench-fio etc.). However, overall I wonder whether this change would break too much scripting out there which relies on these script names (unless you are planning the carrying the deprecated original script names forward for compatibility reasons).

[portante]

for the sake of consistency I would want to see that across the board (i.e. including pbench-fio etc.).

Absolutely that is the intention.

overall I wonder whether this change would break too much scripting out there which relies on these script names

Yes, it would be an incompatible change, but one that we really need to make. In addition to providing a clean interface to the pbench agent side of things, we have too much duplicated code to support so many commands as separate files.

unless you are planning the carrying the deprecated original script names forward for compatibility reasons

So for the interfaces in the util-scripts sub-directory of the tree it seems we would keep a simple compatibility layer for 2 releases after declaring them deprecated, and then dropping them entirely in the 3rd release from the announcement. Users that need more time can stay on the last released version of the pbench-agent until they can migrate.

It seems we need to be aggressive to really make this work.

As for the benchmark scripts, we have plans to move to pbench-run-benchmark for everything, where even pbench-user-benchmark would be a convenience wrapper around pbench-run-benchmark. That would be separate work entirely, but we could make that cut over during this interface transition as well.

Does that make sense?