Merge branch 'main' of github.com:pimvanpelt/vppcfg into main

LICENSE

@@ -1,4 +1,3 @@
-Copyright (c) 2013, Rayed A Alrashed
 Copyright (c) 2021, Pim van Pelt <pim@ipng.nl>
 All rights reserved.
 

README.md

@@ -29,15 +29,20 @@ pyinstaller vppcfg  --onefile
 
 ```
 dist/vppcfg -h
-usage: vppcfg [-h] -c CONFIG [-s SCHEMA] [-d]
+usage: vppcfg [-h] [-s SCHEMA] [-d] [-q] [-f] -c CONFIG {check,plan,apply} ...
+
+positional arguments:
+  {check,plan,apply}
 
 optional arguments:
   -h, --help            show this help message and exit
-  -c CONFIG, --config CONFIG
-                        YAML configuration file for VPP
   -s SCHEMA, --schema SCHEMA
                         YAML schema validation file
-  -d, --debug           Enable debug, default False
+  -d, --debug           Enable debug logging, default False
+  -q, --quiet           Be quiet (only warnings/errors), default False
+  -f, --force           Force progress despite warnings, default False
+  -c CONFIG, --config CONFIG
+                        YAML configuration file for vppcfg
 ```
 
 ## Design
@@ -109,7 +114,7 @@ Fields:
     an error is repeated N times, and it's good practice to precisely establish how many errors
     should be expected. That said, this field can be empty or omitted.
 
-## Reconciling
+## Planning
 
 The second important task of this utility is to take the wellformed (validated) configuration and
 apply it to the VPP dataplane. The overall flow consists of three phases:
@@ -197,3 +202,19 @@ and finally all objects are synchronized with the configuration (IP addresses, M
         must be temporarily set admin-down to change that!)
 1.  Add IPv4/IPv6 addresses
 1.  Set admin state for all interfaces
+
+## Applying
+
+Finally, once the path planner does its work and orders the operations to reconcile the running dataplane
+into the desired configuration, we can apply the configuration. Currently not implemented, pending a bit
+of community feedback. 
+
+For now, the path planner works by reading the API configuration state exactly once (at startup), and then
+it figures out the CLI calls to print without needing to consult VPP again. This is super useful as it’s a
+non-intrusive way to inspect the changes before applying them, and it’s a property I’d like to carry forward.
+However, I don’t necessarily think that emitting the CLI statements is the best user experience, it’s more for
+the purposes of analysis that they can be useful. What I really want to do is emit API calls after the plan
+is created and reviewed/approved, directly reprogramming the VPP dataplane. However, the VPP API set needed
+to do this is not 100% baked yet. For example, I observed crashes when tinkering with BVIs and Loopbacks,
+and fixed a few obvious errors in the Linux CP API but there are still a few more issues to work through
+before I can set the next step with vppcfg.