[Freeipa-devel] [PATCH][RFC] 7 automember rebuild nowait feature added

[Rob Crittenden]

Misnyovszki Adam wrote:
> Hi,
>
> automember-rebuild uses asynchronous 389 task, and returned success
> even if the task didn't run. This patch fixes this issue adding a
> --nowait parameter to 'ipa automember-rebuild', defaulting to False,
> thus when the script runs without it, it waits for the 'nstaskexitcode'
> attribute, which means the task has finished, according to
> http://directory.fedoraproject.org/wiki/Task_Invocation_Via_LDAP#Implementation.
> Old usage can be enabled using --nowait.
>
> https://fedorahosted.org/freeipa/ticket/4239
>
> Request for comments:
> - Should I add a parameter to specify the polling time? (now 1ms)
> - Should I add a parameter to specify the maximum polling number? Now
>    if something fails about creating the task, it polls forever.
> - Obviously, if these parameters should be added, there should be a
>    reasonable default for them (~ Required=False, Default=X).

I don't think you need a polling time, esp since this is hidden from the 
user, but I think that is probably too short and you may end up 
hammering the LDAP server.

I also wonder if there should be some maximum wait time. I don't like 
loops that can never exit. I'm at a loss for what that time should be 
though. And we'd need to spell out that we gave up waiting, not that the 
task necessarily failed. So rather than having a polling time option, 
rename nowait into wait_for=20, so wait for 20 seconds. Or something 
like that.

I'd suggest using get_entry since you already know the full DN and there 
is only ever one. It would make this much more readable.

I wonder if some top-level documentation should be added to flesh this 
out some more. This does, for example, return False in one case. The 
meaning for that should be spelled out.

rob