[Nodeshot] Not reinventing the wheel and Helping out

[nemesis]

 On Sun, 05 Jan 2014 11:13:37 -0600, "Charles N. Wyble" 
 <charles at knownelement.com> wrote:
> On 1/5/2014 10:39 AM, nemesis wrote:
>> On Sun, 05 Jan 2014 10:39:50 -0600, "Charles N. Wyble" 
>> <charles at knownelement.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>> I found this approach so good that I decided to extract a feature 
>>>> of nodeshot into a separate pure-python repository:
>>>> https://github.com/nemesisdesign/netengine
>>>
>>>
>>> Please embrace/extend/use trigger:
>>>
>>> http://trigger.readthedocs.org/en/latest/
>>>
>>> Adding OpenWRT support to that package would be a HUGE win.
>>
>>
>> That would be interesting. But we should get in touch with the 
>> authors of that library before proceeding.
>
> Why?
>
> http://trigger.readthedocs.org/en/latest/new_vendors.html
>
> Just start hacking and send a pull request.

 It's not guaranteed a pull request will be accepted. Few years ago a 
 Google Summer of Code student here in ninux developed a feature for 
 diaspora, the open source federated social network, after he was done he 
 sent the pull request and was not merged because they changed some 
 internals and were not interested in making effort to guarantee backward 
 compatibility for his feature. That was quite a turn down indeed.

>>
>> Our main need is to have a common API to extract information from 
>> devices.
>
> That is precisely what trigger is for. It also supports writing to
> the devices.

 The docs say:

 "Trigger is a Python framework and suite of tools for interfacing with 
 network devices and managing network configuration and security policy. 
 Trigger was designed to increase the speed and efficiency of network 
 configuration management."

 Not exactly the same thing.

 I'm analyzing the documentation.

>> We have to understand if some features we need are compatible with 
>> the goals of that library and if authors are willing to let us 
>> contribute. If they're positive about it that would be awsome :)
>
> They are. They want to support all vendors (according to the site).
> I'm starting work on adding a few vendors I use (h3c/hp/3com).


 Basically, what we need is a method that outputs a dictionary/json with 
 all the data, like this:
 https://github.com/nemesisdesign/netengine/blob/master/netengine/backends/dummy.py#L24