[Freeipa-devel] Structured DNS record API proposal

[Martin Kosek]

On Wed, 2011-09-21 at 10:58 +0200, Adam Tkac wrote:
> On 09/16/2011 02:25 PM, Martin Kosek wrote:
> > On Fri, 2011-09-16 at 08:12 -0400, Simo Sorce wrote:
> >> Whatever you do do not split this operation into a DEL+ADD, we want an
> >> atomic modify operation in any case. as you do not want to have a race
> >> where named may query the MX records and find them empty. That'd be much
> >> worse than returning one of them outdated.
> >>
> >> This means whatever the API we need to support a way to add all values
> >> at the same time. We can also have the more verbose API to make things
> >> more understandable, but we need this "bulk" API for the WebUI IMHO.
> > I agree, the change shouldn't be split to del+add. My proposed API:
> >
> > dnsrecord-mx-mod example.com --dnsrecord="1 mx1.example.com." --preference=0
> >
> > would do just one write to LDAP. Unfortunately, this is not so pretty
> > for CLI, one would have to copy&paste raw DNS value to be able to edit
> > its components, but it should be simple for WebUI. Right now, I don't
> > see some better way.
> >
> I thought about this CLI proposal and it is definitely a good start. In
> the future we can consider to improve the CLI this way, for example:
> 
> $ dnsrecord-mx-mod example.com --preference=0
> Which record would you like to change?
> [1] 1 mx1.example.com.
> [2] 10 mx2.example.com.
> $ <select the record>
> 
> This way will be more convenient for people which use CLI, especially
> when we start to support DNSSEC and resource record types which store
> certificates (CERT/SSHFP) get widely used. I doubt that someone likes
> copying&pasting SHA* hashes and RSA signatures every time when some
> record is modified.
> 
> Regards, Adam

Good idea! I already added some interactive prompt helpers to DNS
plugin, you can check for example dnsrecord_del command, specifically
its interactive_prompt_callback(). This can be also used for -mod/-show
command which will make the command user-friendly for both CLI and WebUI
users.

Martin