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History And Future
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==================
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History
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#######
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The first version of econtext was written in late 2006 for use in an
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infrastructure management program, however at the time I lacked the pragmatism
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necessary for pushing my little design from concept to a working
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implementation. I tired of it when I couldn't find a way to combine every
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communication style (*blocking execute function, asynchronous execute function,
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proxy slave-of-slave context*) into one neat abstraction. That unification
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still has not happened, but I'm no longer as burdened by the problem.
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Every few years I would pick through the source code, especially after periods
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of working commercially with some contemporary management systems, none of
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which in the meantime had anything close to as neat an approach to running
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Python code on remote machines, and suffered from shockingly beginner-level
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bugs such as failing to report SSH diagnostic messages.
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And every few years I'd put that code down again, especially since moving to an
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OS X laptop where :py:func:`select.poll` was not available, the struggle to get
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back on top of the project seemed more hassle than it was worth.
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That changed in 2016 during a quiet evening at home with a clear head and
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nothing better to do, after a full day of exposure to Ansible's intensely
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unbearable tendency to make running a 50 line Python script across a 1Gbit/sec
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LAN feel like I were configuring a host on Mars. Poking through what Ansible
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was doing, I was shocked to discover it writing temporary files everywhere, and
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uploading a 56KiB zip file apparently for every playbook step.
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.. figure:: _static/wtf.gif
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All contemporary Devops tooling
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Searching around for something to play with, I came across my forgotten
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``src/econtext`` directory and somehow in a few hours managed to squash most of
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the race conditions and logic bugs that were preventing reliable operation,
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write the IO and log forwarders, rewrite the module importer, move from
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:py:func:`select.poll` to :py:func:`select.select`, and even refactor the
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special cases out of the main loop.
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So there you have it. As of writing :py:mod:`econtext.core` consists of 550
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source lines, and those 550 lines have taken me almost a decade to write. I
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have long had a preference for avoiding infrastructure work commercially, not
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least for the inescapable depression induced by considering the wasted effort
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across the world caused by universally horrific tooling. This is my small
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contribution to a solution, I hope you find it useful.
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Future
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######
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* Connect back using TCP and SSL.
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* Python 3 support.
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* Windows support via psexec or similar.
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* Investigate cPickle safety and potentially replace it.
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* Predictive import: reduce roundtrips by pipelining modules observed to
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probably be requested in future.
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* Provide a means for waiting on multiple
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:py:class:`Channels <econtext.core.Channel>`.
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* Comprehensive integration tests.
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