[Python-ideas] shutil.runret and shutil.runout

[Eli Bendersky]

On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 08:27, Nick Coghlan <ncoghlan at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sun, Feb 26, 2012 at 12:03 AM, Stephen J. Turnbull
> <stephen at xemacs.org> wrote:
> > Nick Coghlan writes:
> >
> >  > As things stand, Python is a lousy language for system administration
> >  > tasks
> >
> > Yeah, the worst possible sysadmin language except for all the others.
> > AFAICT it more than holds its own with distro maintainers, no?
>
> For applications where correctness in all circumstances is the
> dominant criterion? Sure.
>
> For throwaway scripts, though, most of the Linux sysadmins I know just
> use shell scripts or Perl. For the devops (and deployment automation
> in general) crowd, there's no real Python-based competitor to Chef and
> Puppet (both Ruby based) (my understanding is that the Python-based
> Fabric doesn't play in *quite* the same space as the other two).
>
> As things currently stand, Python deliberately makes it hard to say "I
> want my individual commands to be shell commands, but I also want
> Python's superior flow control constructs to decide which shell
> commands to run". For an application, that's a good thing. For
> personal automation, it's not.
>

Personally I find Python just find for all kinds of automation, including
bash/Perl replacement. Yes, some things may be a few characters more to
type than in Perl, but I'm happy to have all the other Python features and
libraries in my arsenal. Sysadmins use what they learned, and it also
depends on culture. Some places do use Python for sysadmin stuff too.

The Chef/Puppet/Fabric example is a good one to support this point - Ruby,
like Python is also more a dev language than a sysadmin language, and yet
Chef & Puppet are written in Ruby and not Perl.

Eli
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