--upload-tools or other bootstrap options not passed to bootstrap command

[Marco Ceppi]

When using something like maas, where streams are currently not working or supported, to make the quickstart experience better it'd be great is a few commands, like --upload-tools, were allowed via either the commandline or as "advanced" options. Without this the user experience of "First time! Install quickstart and run -i" is diminished.

[Francesco Banconi (frankban)]

It would be nice to improve the scope definition for this task. What's the goal?
To be clear, adding --upload-tools to quickstart is trivial. That said, IIUC this would represent a workaround for a MaaS limitation. Is this a structural limitation or a bug that will eventually be fixed? One of the quickstart goals is to only support stable versions of juju, in which usually --upload-tools is not required. This is good from the user experience perspective and also reduces code complexity. Moreover, while by now we are used to --upload-tools, from the quickstart users' point of view it doesn't seem easy to me to explain the underlying concept: it requires understanding of how juju-core works internally, and AFAICT it is supposed to be a development tool. I can agree on adding this kind of advanced flags, but I think the above must be considered before following that path. If we expect the MaaS issue not to be solved in the medium term, another option could be changing quickstart so that --upload-tools is automatically added to the bootstrap args if the provider type is maas: this is doable since quickstart already detected the env type when bootstrap is executed.

[Richard Harding (rharding)]

Thanks for the notes Francesco. I admit, my first thought was that quickstart could pass flags it did not directly handle to the underlying calls, but that might not be practical. In this way, if you knew what you wanted to do you could do it, but it's not going to over complicate things for new users.

[Marco Ceppi (marcoceppi)]

There aren't many flags open for bootstrap command, mainly --upload-tools (any private cloud and maas will need this), and --constraints are the first two flags that should be read in and passed to the underlying bootstrap call. Quickstart has grown to be more than just a tool for users who don't know juju, but it provides a great interface for demos (compare reading YAML to quickstart -i) as well as making bootstrap + gui deployments really awesome.

This wouldn't be something you had to tell users, rather something that power users who use juju in environments outside of public clouds want to show.