glance image-list should sort on name, not UUID

[Daniel Berrange]

Look at the output of the following command

$ glance image-list
+--------------------------------------+---------------------------------+-------------+------------------+-----------+--------+
| ID | Name | Disk Format | Container Format | Size | Status |
+--------------------------------------+---------------------------------+-------------+------------------+-----------+--------+
| 2f199e99-babd-4a1f-93b2-bf38a8b7a4fa | cirros-0.3.0-x86_64-uec-kernel | aki | aki | 4731440 | active |
| 41152594-f1cc-4f0b-b04d-d7b5f21907c4 | cirros-0.3.0-x86_64-uec | ami | ami | 25165824 | active |
| 54932597-48cd-4ae5-bda7-fdf397116ae0 | evil | qcow2 | bare | 197120 | active |
| 6faf19bb-a5a9-4b44-a932-7e2c0f8135d1 | f17-x86_64-openstack-sda | qcow2 | bare | 251985920 | active |
| 9474c929-9651-4e09-8565-4a5a7acf256a | f18-x86_64-openstack-sda | qcow2 | bare | 279511040 | active |
| a13223fe-a458-4c4a-b61b-a2bc743660bf | cirros-0.3.0-x86_64-uec-ramdisk | ari | ari | 2254249 | active |
| c7251cc3-11f4-40a4-a867-96780af3d0a8 | foo | | | 251985920 | active |
| ca1bb9f9-e659-4561-8c06-33609cbf2575 | f16-x86_64-openstack-sda | qcow2 | bare | 213581824 | active |
+--------------------------------------+---------------------------------+-------------+------------------+-----------+--------+

Notice how it has sorted the images based on the "ID" column UUID strings. This is incredibly unhelpful for humans, effectively equivalent to no sorting at all, since UUIDs are randomly generated strings. It should be sorting the images based on the 'Name' column. While not a huge issue when you have < 10 images, if you have 100's of images registered the current sorting makes the command practically unusable

[Brian Waldon (bcwaldon)]

I can't decide if the most useful sort is by name, or by creation date (showing newest/oldest images first). As consumers of the CLI tool, what would be most useful to see at the top of the list?

[Brian Waldon (bcwaldon)]

Additionally, see https://review.openstack.org/16847. I added the --sort-key and --sort-dir options to the v1 image-list command. At this point, we just need to decide what the sanest default values are for those flags.

[Daniel Berrange (berrange)]

I still believe that sort by name is the only sensible default. As an example of the problems with sort-by-date, devstack uploads images to glance in parallel, and so its unpredictable which will be done first. In the case of images which have a kernel+initrd image, you can end up in a scenario where the kernel/initrd do not sort alongside their corresponding disk image, due to another image being uploaded in parallel. Sort by name is the only way to get this working nicely.

[Mark Washenberger (markwash)]

I guess I would prefer for the default to be determined by the server (i.e., the default is to *not* use a sort-key and sort-dir). And then the server would need to do something sufficiently sensible.

However, I think for the purposes of the glance client shell tool, it makes a lot of sense to be sorted by name, so +1 to that approach.

[Daniel Berrange (berrange)]

To sake of clarity, when I requested this I was only thinking about sorting in the context of the glance client tool. IMHO the server side APIs should just say that sort order is "undefined", so the server is free todo whatever is most appropriate at the time.

[Brian Waldon (bcwaldon)]

The important distinction to be made is that the python-glanceclient CLI and python-glancelient lib will do different things - the former will sort by name asc, and the latter will not set a sort key/dir (leaving it up to the server).

[OpenStack Infra (hudson-openstack)]

Fix proposed to branch: master
Review: https://review.openstack.org/17065

[OpenStack Infra (hudson-openstack)]

Reviewed: https://review.openstack.org/17065
Committed: http://github.com/openstack/python-glanceclient/commit/4fa68052423c475d25cdb45610f4827aed13d509
Submitter: Jenkins
Branch: master

commit 4fa68052423c475d25cdb45610f4827aed13d509
Author: Brian Waldon <email address hidden>
Date: Wed Nov 28 09:50:46 2012 -0800

    Change default image sort to use name

    Fixes bug 1081542.

    Change-Id: I9e09c3fe3b6c2bfce7e37df1d29b37a42168e878