Re: [BuildStream] Reboot discussion: bst artifact subcommand group

[James Ennis <james ennis codethink co uk>]

Hi Tristan,

Thank you for taking the time to summarise and reboot this discussion,
just a couple of points from me.

> Specifying artifacts on the command line
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> All the commands in the subgroup should accept the same format
> for specifying artifacts, this includes:
>
>   - An element name: If element(s) are specified, they need to
>     be loaded and have their cache keys resolved, specifying an
>     element implies that we want to specify the artifact with
>     the corresponding cache key.
>
>   - Artifact name, which is:
>
>        "%{project-name}/%{element-name}/%{cache-key}"
>
>   - Glob pattern matching would be important, in order to support
>     commands where we can observe all of the artifacts for a given
>     element, e.g.: `bst artifact show project/element/*`
>
>     This could be an augmentation but rather easy to implement given
>     the rest of the machinery.
>
>   - Tab completion should be supported for artifact names

Tab completion and glob pattern matching are already possible. One
downside, is that for large caches (with many artifacts), tab completion
can be quite expensive/slow.

>   - As Sander pointed out[1], it would also be good to be able to
>     address artifacts with *only* a cache key.

+1, I assume this would also support the abbreviated cache key?

> Commands
> --------
> There was not much discussion on the individual commands proposed.
>
> I think there is pretty much automatic consensus on:
>
>   - push
>   - pull
>   - checkout
>   - log

I would also add `delete` to this list.

> Other commands originally proposed were, but I couldn't really say
> there is consensus as it was not discussed very much:
>
>   - diff
>
>     Show the added/removed/changed files between two artifacts
>
>   - list-content
>
>     List the content of an artifact, optionally showing sizes
>     of individual files (think something like `tar -tf file.tar`
>     but for artifacts)
>
>   - list
>
>     list some artifacts specified on the command line, showing
>     artifact creation date and overall size and any interesting
>     information about the artifact

So Richard Maw actually achieved a lot of this, however, it was agreed
that his implementation used too much low level/internal logic in the
front end, thus work on this ceased and we implemented ArtifactElement,
renamed pull/push/checkout and introduced `delete`.

The (closed) MR is here: 
https://gitlab.com/BuildStream/buildstream/merge_requests/1008
Hopefully this will provide some sort of head start to whoever picks
up this work.

> Cheers,
>     -Tristan
>
>
> [0]: 
> https://mail.gnome.org/archives/buildstream-list/2019-June/msg00003.html
> [1]:
> https://mail.gnome.org/archives/buildstream-list/2018-September/msg00028.html
> [2]: https://gitlab.com/BuildStream/buildstream/issues/1034
> [3]:
> https://mail.gnome.org/archives/buildstream-list/2018-September/msg00030.html

Thanks,
James

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