[PetiteCloud] general thoughts on archicture

[Aryeh Friedman]

One way to think of petitecloud is nothing more then a brillian script
generator.  Namely it does all the precondtion checks on it's own and then
generates a serialized script (no loops or conditionals) to the task it
needs to do this.

Currently some of this done by doing one shot commands straight from the
business logic (and the underlying drivers).   This makes stuff fast and
easy for typical cases but some of the flexibility that we are talking
about it breaks it very fast.

An example of such a design dilemma is hyperv support spread across
muiltiple host OS's.   Namely the actual syntax (and sometimes the
semantics) for how a given hyperv is called on one OS is different then on
a different host OS.  Also sometimes the semantics even differ between the
same hyperv on the same OS.  For example the only difference between
"bhyve-freebsd" and "bhyve-linux" is the name of the bhyveload and how it
is called (namely you need to also make/populate the device map dir).

We realized a few weeks ago that this created a "N time M" problem in how
many classes we have (i.e. we would need to subclass each hyperv for each
supported OS).   This gets really hard to manage very quickly and is due to
it's complexity likely to be the source of many bugs (i.e. bugs not in the
scripts generated but the wrong script be generated [and within the context
it was generated it is correct]).

An other solution is we just do a partial externalization of the scripts
themselves.   This way we just do the mixing and matching at runtime and
not compile time and the lack of a script template indicates lack of
support (one major issue we had under the above design was how to handle
unsupported operations).

In order to do this right we would need to do the following:

1. Come up with a universal script templating system (i.e. tell PC where
the blanks to be filled in are)

2. Refactor PC so all calls to OSCommand (except trivial ones that are only
generation prep calls) they all go through some form of script

3. Redesign most of the sub-business logic architecture to be nothing but
smart script callers (they internalize far too much right now)

-- 
Aryeh M. Friedman, Lead Developer, http://www.PetiteCloud.org
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