What makes a charm good?

[Tom Haddon]

On 13/09/12 22:51, Jorge O. Castro wrote:
[...]
> None of these criteria are set in stone, and I'm sure people will have
> strong opinions on what features make a charm great. Our initial
> discussion for this list was quite passionate, so I'm looking forward
> to seeing what you all think is important.
> 
> Thoughts? Concerns?

"Charms run as root on the target instance, which means if you can
script it to grab your source tarball and install it, you can totally do
that. If your software isn't in the Ubuntu archive then this is the way
to go, you should only need to worry about verifying the source of the
binary."

I really don't think this is something we should be actively encouraging
people to do. If you're pulling from an external location it makes the
charms fragile, as well as meaning that depending on how it's configured
you're not getting security fixes of any kind. I'm sure there will be
organisations that will have policies preventing them from using
something that operates in this way.

Under "Flexible" you have:

"""
+1 Contain opinionated tuning options
  - "safe", "default", "fast", "real fast, not so safe"
  - Don't expose every configuration, pick that reflect real world usage
  - Make it so I don't have to read the book.
"""

To me this isn't "flexible", this is "easy to use". "Flexible" would be
"exposes every possible configuration option so you can customise the
service to your exact requirements".

Thanks, Tom