Charm layers & Windows

[Marco Ceppi]

On Sat, Apr 16, 2016, 2:12 AM Andrew Wilkins <andrew.wilkins at canonical.com>
wrote:

> On Tue, Apr 5, 2016 at 7:30 AM Andrew Wilkins <
> andrew.wilkins at canonical.com> wrote:
>
>> On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 10:42 PM Marco Ceppi <marco.ceppi at canonical.com>
>> wrote:
>>
>>> There are two things that need to be done. The first, we need the
>>> reactive framework to be ported to powershell - that way we can have charms
>>> written in powershell and compiled as such. I know the cloud base folks
>>> poked at that a bit in Gent during the Summit but I haven't heard much from
>>> there.
>>>
>>> The second, is two base layers. The first is a powershell base layer so
>>> you get the awesome powerhshell helpers cloudbase has created (like the
>>> python charm helpers). That way native power shell layers can be written.
>>> The second is to create a python-windows base layer, this would be the
>>> basic layer and then the necessary methods to install Python on the windows
>>> machine so that python layers work properly.
>>>
>>> Some of this we can pilot ourselves, (mostly the python-windows layer) -
>>> some of the team is sprinting so I'll add that as a stretch goal. The
>>> powershell native features we'll need help and I admit I've done a terrible
>>> job keeping up with the cloudbase folks who have been invaluable as a
>>> windows + juju resource thus far.
>>>
>>
>> Thanks, Marco. FWIW, I had imagined an MVP just as Stuart described: add
>> the Windows bootstrap scripts (install.ps1|bat|cmd, etc.), which should
>> just need to install Python and then defer to the reactive framework. Going
>> full Powershell support sounds ideal, but not what I'm after.
>>
>
> Brief update: I managed to get a Hello World reactive charm running on a
> Windows VM in Azure.
>
> My charm:
>  - includes the Python 3.5.1 web installer. It's reasonably small (just
> under 1MiB).
>  - has a short PowerShell hook script (install.ps1) that installs Python
> and PyYAML; and then defers to the standard Python hook (install.py)
>
> To enable private cloud deployments, it would probably make more sense for
> the charm to require Python as a resource. I just did what I did for
> expedience.
>
> I had to make a handful of changes to the basic layer, charm-helpers, and
> charms.reactive.
> In the basic layer, there are some Ubuntu assumptions that I had to
> remove: it wants to apt-get install stuff. Also, I changed it to use
> "python -m pip", rather than the pip command directly, which I didn't have
> available.
>
> I had to make three classes of changes to charm-helpers and
> charms.reactive:
>  - refer to hook tools as (e.g.) status-set.exe, rather than status-set
>  - don't require unix-specific Python modules, like "pwd" and "grp"
>  - run Python hooks with python(.exe), rather than assuming
> shebang/executable
>
> If it's acceptable to do so, I'll propose changes to charmhelpers and
> charms.reactive at some point. It would be nice to be able to have a core
> set of Python helpers that work on all platforms.
>

I think instead it'd be better to break some of the charm
helpers.core.hookenv methods to a simpler, streamlined, charms.juju or
charms.hooktools where it is _just_ the juju hook-tools and nothing more.
It's something we've talked about these last few months in ecosystems/juju
list but haven't quite had the time to flesh out.


> And just to be clear: I'm not suggesting that all all of charmhelpers
> should be OS neutral; but at least the core bits for interacting with Juju,
> and for writing reactive charms.
>
> Cheers,
> Andrew
>
> Cheers,
>> Andrew
>>
>>
>>> Marco
>>>
>>> On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 7:46 AM Rick Harding <rick.harding at canonical.com>
>>> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I know that Gabriel and some of the CloudBase folks seemed interested
>>>> in layers and possibly some tooling with powershell. I'm not sure how far
>>>> that went but I thought they were experimenting during the charmer's
>>>> summit. That would help with a charm build on windows, but not for some
>>>> common code between both operating systems.
>>>>
>>>> An interesting thing is how much setup and how ootb the Ubuntu on
>>>> Windows needs. If it's working out of the box, it might be an interesting
>>>> move for us and our tools that Windows users could get a Linux experience.
>>>> I guess that it won't be ideal though as I'm not sure what the server side
>>>> plans around that work is.
>>>>
>>>> On Mon, Apr 4, 2016 at 3:18 AM Andrew Wilkins <
>>>> andrew.wilkins at canonical.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>> Hi,
>>>>>
>>>>> I would like to write a charm that should be mostly identical on
>>>>> Windows and Linux, so I think it would make sense to have common code in
>>>>> the form of a layer.
>>>>>
>>>>> Is anyone working on getting "charm build", layers, and friends to
>>>>> work with Windows workloads? If not, I may look into it myself.
>>>>>
>>>>> Cheers,
>>>>> Andrew
>>>>> --
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>>>>>
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>>>
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