[2.3] Please change the agent state 'executing' to 'exec'

[Mark Shuttleworth]

The status output is getting really good in 2.x. One thing that stands out is the length of 'executing'. If we change that to 'exec' it lines up nicely with 'idle'. Any other states in that column?

[Anastasia (anastasia-macmood)]

This is the list of all agents' status values.

Common to unit and machine agents:
 - error
 - started

Specific to machine agents:
 - down
 - pending
 - stopped

Specific to unit agents:
 - allocating
 - executing
 - failed
 - idle
 - lost
 - rebooting

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

Thanks Anastasia. How about:

 - error
 - started
 - down
 - pending
 - stopped
 - allocate
 - exec
 - idle
 - reboot

Of these, 'allocate' is the oddball. What does it actually mean that the unit agent is 'allocating'?

[Anastasia (anastasia-macmood)]

The quick answer is that "allocating" is the initial agent status when the unit is created.

A longer answer :D
"allocating" for unit agent is set when the machine destined for this unit is also being allocated. The most basic example of this is when we 'juju deploy <application name>', the first unit created for this application will be waiting for its machine to come up and will be in "allocating" state while the machine is being prepared.

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

OK, so we could use the message to provide more insight, and a shorter
word than 'allocating' in the table. How about 'pending'? It's common to
machine agent, because I think it's the same thing in both cases right?

Mark

[Ian Booth (wallyworld)]

If memory serves, we used to use "pending" for both machine and unit agents. However, several people did a review of things and the advice was that for units, "allocating" was better, as in the machine on which the unit is to be run is being allocated by the cloud. But if length is an issue, then I guess we can change it back to "pending".

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

How about 'holding'? I think there's some benefit to a unique word
because then things like IRC and bug reports don't need a second round
of questions for disambiguation.

Mark

[Ian Booth (wallyworld)]

Yeah, the disambiguation aspect also come into the decision to rename the "pending" unit status, now that you mention it.

To me, "holding" doesn't really convey much unless you know Juju. How about "booting"? As in the machine which the unit will run is "booting". That term is analogous to bare metal so I would expect most folks would intuitively be able to reason about what it means?

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

Booting would be better for the machine agent :) It's a good word but I
think it will confuse people. What's really happening is waiting-for-boot :)

What about "queued"?

Mark

[Ian Booth (wallyworld)]

"queued" sounds great to me

[Anastasia (anastasia-macmood)]

Mark,

Changing status values this late in Juju 2.x may take a lot of users by surprise. For example, users that have scripts checking and acting on status values that are in yaml or json format.

We can, however, display the values that you are suggesting in tabular format only.

What do you think?

[Mark Shuttleworth (sabdfl)]

On 28/07/17 01:32, Anastasia wrote:
> We can, however, display the values that you are suggesting in tabular
> format only.

OK, let's make the change in tabular only and document the difference
for scripters where we talk about the yaml/json output.

Please make a note for 3.x to switch to the same values for json as well
as tabular.

Thanks!
Mark

[Canonical Juju QA Bot (juju-qa-bot)]

This bug has not been updated in 5 years, so we're marking it Expired. If you believe this is incorrect, please update the status.