On the Guile-SSH future

On the Guile-SSH future

[Artyom Poptsov]

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Hello Guilers.

For those of you who interested in a new release of Guile-SSH [1]:

I *do not* lost an interest in the project, I'm just buried under my
jobs and other tasks.  Yet I'm trying to allocate some time slices for
Guile-SSH.  For example, I just merged the new implementation of RREPL
(stateless RREPL, thanks to Ludovic for the idea) to the master branch.

Currently one of the main showstoppers for the project is the
implementation of the tests: they're failing sometimes and sometimes get
stuck due to some kind of dead-lock or something.  I'm tired of dragging
the current implementation with all its "quirks" from release to
release, so there's a burning need to fix it somehow or re-implement the
testing for the project altogether.  So I guess I'm not going to make a
release untill the problem is fixed.

Many problems with the tests are arising from the fact that Guile-SSH
needs multi-process tests (i.e. client-server tests) and SRFI-64 alone
that I use for tests seems to be a little bit insufficient on its own
for such tests, so I built some kind of a testing framework upon it.

I'd appreciate any testing and help.

Thanks,

- Artyom

[1] https://github.com/artyom-poptsov/guile-ssh

-- 
Artyom V. Poptsov <poptsov.artyom@gmail.com>
Home page: http://poptsov-artyom.narod.ru/
CADR Hackerspace co-founder: https://cadrspace.ru/
GPG: D0C2 EAC1 3310 822D 98DE  B57C E9C5 A2D9 0898 A02F

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Re: On the Guile-SSH future

[Arne Babenhauserheide]

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Hi Artyom,

Artyom Poptsov <poptsov.artyom@gmail.com> writes:

> For those of you who interested in a new release of Guile-SSH [1]:

Yes, definitely!

I mostly have one question: Is Guile-SSH ready to use for writing
maintenance tools on a cluster (like a tool execute-on-each-node)?

> [1] https://github.com/artyom-poptsov/guile-ssh

Best wishes,
Arne
-- 
Unpolitisch sein
heißt politisch sein
ohne es zu merken

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Re: On the Guile-SSH future

[Ludovic Courtès]

Hi Artyom,

Artyom Poptsov <poptsov.artyom@gmail.com> skribis:

> Currently one of the main showstoppers for the project is the
> implementation of the tests: they're failing sometimes and sometimes get
> stuck due to some kind of dead-lock or something.  I'm tired of dragging
> the current implementation with all its "quirks" from release to
> release, so there's a burning need to fix it somehow or re-implement the
> testing for the project altogether.  So I guess I'm not going to make a
> release untill the problem is fixed.
>
> Many problems with the tests are arising from the fact that Guile-SSH
> needs multi-process tests (i.e. client-server tests) and SRFI-64 alone
> that I use for tests seems to be a little bit insufficient on its own
> for such tests, so I built some kind of a testing framework upon it.

I think these kinds of tests are inherently hard to get right and to
make reliable.  These are more or less distributed computing issues: you
need to distinguish between slow response and no response, and you might
want to resort to some out-of-band synchronization mechanism (meaning
that you don’t rely on Guile-SSH itself to synchronize, say, an SSH
server and its client under test).

So SRFI-64 is not always great, but I’m not sure it’s the real source of
pain here.

(Not that it really helps, though…)

Ludo’.

Re: On the Guile-SSH future

[Linas Vepstas]

FYI, I've written a guile telnet server; unfortunately it is deeply buried
in another project and would be hard to abstract.

Why do this? Well, because the default guile-2.2 network REPL server was
slow, would crash, deadlock, have terrible response times, etc. making it
embarrassingly unusable.

I spent an afternoon googling around for a generic telnet/ssh/ssl/whatever
interactive network login terminal server, and, amazingly, got nothing. One
might think that many people/projects/organizations might have a
stand-alone interactive shell of some kind, and needed to slap an
ssh/telnet/whatever interface on it.  Why doesn't such a thing exist?

Maybe because it sounds easy, at first, until you hit the scalability &
reliability and throughput and latency issues, and then ... well, it gets
really hard and really painful to debug.  Whatever. Yes, the world needs
one of these.

-- Linas



On Sun, May 12, 2019 at 11:33 AM Artyom Poptsov <poptsov.artyom@gmail.com>
wrote:

> Hello Guilers.
>
> For those of you who interested in a new release of Guile-SSH [1]:
>
> I *do not* lost an interest in the project, I'm just buried under my
> jobs and other tasks.  Yet I'm trying to allocate some time slices for
> Guile-SSH.  For example, I just merged the new implementation of RREPL
> (stateless RREPL, thanks to Ludovic for the idea) to the master branch.
>
> Currently one of the main showstoppers for the project is the
> implementation of the tests: they're failing sometimes and sometimes get
> stuck due to some kind of dead-lock or something.  I'm tired of dragging
> the current implementation with all its "quirks" from release to
> release, so there's a burning need to fix it somehow or re-implement the
> testing for the project altogether.  So I guess I'm not going to make a
> release untill the problem is fixed.
>
> Many problems with the tests are arising from the fact that Guile-SSH
> needs multi-process tests (i.e. client-server tests) and SRFI-64 alone
> that I use for tests seems to be a little bit insufficient on its own
> for such tests, so I built some kind of a testing framework upon it.
>
> I'd appreciate any testing and help.
>
> Thanks,
>
> - Artyom
>
> [1] https://github.com/artyom-poptsov/guile-ssh
>
> --
> Artyom V. Poptsov <poptsov.artyom@gmail.com>
> Home page: http://poptsov-artyom.narod.ru/
> CADR Hackerspace co-founder: https://cadrspace.ru/
> GPG: D0C2 EAC1 3310 822D 98DE  B57C E9C5 A2D9 0898 A02F
>


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