MTUI is a tool used by QA-Maintenance in testing maintenance updates. Saddled with a host of questionable choices for its interfaces and implementation, it includes a number of difficult-to-fix bugs and hostility toward change. While not the first choice for me, the time's come to scout out a different approach. Welcome SMRT.

SMRT will be an alternative to MTUI, and will eventually supercede it.

SMRT's interfaces will differ from those of MTUI, most prominently: it will not provide a (very) poor interactive shell: you already have a shell on your computer and it's much more powerful, and much less buggy, than whatever we can hope to provide given the limited manpower.

Why is there an MTUI shell at all? MTUI keeps state, such as ssh connections to refhosts, between commands. This is a sensible thing given the speed (not really) of some of our refhosts. Staying in a single long-lived foreground process with an interactive shell is superficially easier than going client/server with the server keeping the state on a UNIX doman socket and clients implementing individual MTUI commands.

Major components of SMRT will be:

  • GNU parallel
  • OpenSSH
  • POSIX sh
  • Zsh

SMRT will have both client and server (refhost) side. The refhost side will use only those tools which are available in the minimal SLE install.

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This project is part of:

Hack Week 13

Activity

  • almost 9 years ago: dwaas liked this project.
  • almost 9 years ago: rneuhauser started this project.
  • almost 9 years ago: rneuhauser originated this project.

  • Comments

    • rneuhauser
      almost 9 years ago by rneuhauser | Reply

      I have settled the design and have basic infrastructure for developing (tests) in place, including a few bits of functionality.

    • smithfarm
      almost 9 years ago by smithfarm | Reply

      What does SMRT stand for?

      • pluskalm
        over 8 years ago by pluskalm | Reply

        Something like Suse Maintenance Reject Tool

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