[ubuntu-cloud] Fwd: #part-handler

[Bo Shi]

Clint, Scott - sorry about the late reply.

I did not explain myself particularly well.  Here's another attempt.
The CloudInit documentation section for "Multipart Input" states "[a]
single format of user data might not be enough to accomplish what you
want. For example, you may want to insert an upstart job and also run
a user-data script."  The example provided is:

  $ ls
  my-boothook.txt     my-include.txt      my-user-script.txt
  my-cloudconfig.txt  my-upstart-job.txt

  $ write-mime-multipart --output=combined-userdata.txt \
     my-boothook.txt:text/cloud-boothook \
     my-include.txt:text/x-include-url \
     my-upstart-job.txt:text/upstart-job \
     my-user-script.txt:text/x-shellscript \
     my-cloudconfig.txt

Is the order of execution of the various parts deterministic?  Can the
order of execution be controlled in any manner, e.g. can I specify
that "my-include.txt" depends on "my-user-script.txt" finishing?  A
rather contrived use-case is if my-cloudconfig.txt was used to create
some users and my-include.txt performed some operation on those users'
home directories.  Another case is described in my original note.

> To control order in which user-data is processed you should just need to
> control the order in which it is created.

Does this mean that the order in which the parts are specified in the
invokation of "write-mime-multipart" above determines the order in
which the parts gets executed?  Is execution serial (my observations
lean toward no here)?


On Tue, Feb 12, 2013 at 4:16 PM, Scott Moser <smoser at ubuntu.com> wrote:
> On Mon, 11 Feb 2013, Bo Shi wrote:
>
>> Hi Folks,
>>
>> Is there a way to ensure that a particular custom part-handler is run
>> as the very last component to execute?
>>
>
> In multipart input, part-handlers
>  * the method 'handle_part' with signature (data,ctype,filename,payload)
>    is the handler
>  * execute the handler initialization (cdata=__begin__) in the order they
>    are found,
>  * replace any existing handlers for the types they claim
>  * will immediately start handling any subsequent parts of the
>    type they're registered for.
>  * have handle_part called with cdata='__end__' called in undefined order
>    after all user-data content has been handled.
>
>> We use EC2 UserData (augmented via Ubuntu's CloudInit) to install
>> dependencies and have a relatively generic script to invoke
>> ec2-bundle-vol.  Due to us not being terribly sophisticated in
>> controlling the part execution order of our multi-part UserData, we're
>> somewhat constrained on the CloudInit features we can use.  It would
>> be straightforward to convert it to a part-handler plugin but, of
>> course, this particular handler would have to execute last.
>
> So, I'm kind of confused as to what "execute last" means here.
> Where you wanting defined execution order of the handle_part with
> 'cdata=__end__'.
>
> To control order in which user-data is processed you should just need to
> control the order in which it is created.
>
> Does that make sense?