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Bash scripts (to pick the most popular shell language) are hard to write, hard to debug (no stack traces), have weird historical artifacts, like not having name

by herge 11y ago

Bash scripts (to pick the most popular shell language) are hard to write, hard to debug (no stack traces), have weird historical artifacts, like not having named arguments to functions, or [[ $foo == true ]] or a whole slew of gotchas that make writing and maintaining them unpleasant. If your application is written in ruby or python, why should you learn another (worse scripting, but that's just my opinion) language to deploy it?

_wmd 11y ago
> hard to write, hard to debug (no stack traces), have weird historical artifacts Only slightly being sarcy, but this perfectly describes my experience of Salt, Ansible and Chef, but instead of a handful of 'ps' commands to figure out what's going on, you have Python/Ruby interpreters on both sides of the SSH connection, giant gumps of weird SSH command lines, a big C++ library and multitudes of TCP ports and home-grown crypto (Salt+ZeroMQ), perfectly descriptionless error messages like "Timed out", "command failed", or even worse, something you never had to deal with in shell: "template syntax error". I have a personal axe to grind in this department (been thinking about this style of system since the mid 2000s, but never dared start yet another project), so it's entirely possible my expectations are higher than normal here. Still.. processing YAML with Jinja2? Seriously, bash or the most arcane old Makefile syntax was better than this.
- herge 11y ago
  Yeah, I agree with you, the tools are lacking. My favorite to date is ansible, but it's a pain to guess the syntax to the magic language that ansible has encoded inside yaml. But then that's maybe that's more of an ansible 1.1 or 1.2 issue, not sure if it's relevant anymore. I kinda wish I could just write python scripts that would use ansible as a library.
  - willthames 11y ago
    You can use ansible as a library from python: http://docs.ansible.com/developing_api.html http://docs.ansible.com/developing_api.html

by herge 11y ago

_wmd 11y ago

> hard to write, hard to debug (no stack traces), have weird historical artifacts Only slightly being sarcy, but this perfectly describes my experience of Salt, Ansible and Chef, but instead of a handful of 'ps' commands to figure out what's going on, you have Python/Ruby interpreters on both sides of the SSH connection, giant gumps of weird SSH command lines, a big C++ library and multitudes of TCP ports and home-grown crypto (Salt+ZeroMQ), perfectly descriptionless error messages like "Timed out", "command failed", or even worse, something you never had to deal with in shell: "template syntax error". I have a personal axe to grind in this department (been thinking about this style of system since the mid 2000s, but never dared start yet another project), so it's entirely possible my expectations are higher than normal here. Still.. processing YAML with Jinja2? Seriously, bash or the most arcane old Makefile syntax was better than this.

herge 11y ago
Yeah, I agree with you, the tools are lacking. My favorite to date is ansible, but it's a pain to guess the syntax to the magic language that ansible has encoded inside yaml. But then that's maybe that's more of an ansible 1.1 or 1.2 issue, not sure if it's relevant anymore. I kinda wish I could just write python scripts that would use ansible as a library.
- willthames 11y ago
  You can use ansible as a library from python: http://docs.ansible.com/developing_api.html http://docs.ansible.com/developing_api.html