[Freeipa-devel] CSV support in IPA administration tools - to be, or not to be?

[Petr Spacek]

Hello,

is there any user of CSV support built-in to IPA administration tools ("ipa" 
command)? Do you consider it sane or even useful? Please reply.


I wanted to add single TXT record with double quotation marks (") inside the 
TXT data.

I spent some time figuring out how it is supposed to work ... and with help of 
Petr^3 I managed to write the command.

The resulting command (for BASH) is absolutely crazy:
ipa dnsrecord-add example.test. newrec --txt-rec='"""created on 13:01:23"""'

Do we really need support for this piece of insanity? Shells can do the same 
thing with much less pain :-)

IPA with CSV support can add multiple attributes at once, e.g.
ipa dnsrecord-add example.test. newrec --txt-rec=1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9
will add TXT records with value 1, 2, 3 etc.

BASH can do the same thing (without the escaping hell):
ipa dnsrecord-add example.test. newrec --txt-rec={1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9}
and
ipa dnsrecord-add example.test. newrec --txt-rec={1..9}
BASH would expand to
ipa dnsrecord-add example.test. newrec --txt-rec=1 --txt-rec=2 --txt-rec=3 
--txt-rec=4 --txt-rec=5 --txt-rec=6 --txt-rec=7 --txt-rec=8 --txt-rec=9

-- 
Petr^2 Spacek