[pmg-devel] [PATCH pmg-api 3/4] partially fix #2077: pmgsh: remove dependency on Term::ReadLine

[Stoiko Ivanov]

On Fri, 19 Sep 2025 10:41:45 +0200
Fiona Ebner <f.ebner at proxmox.com> wrote:

> Am 18.09.25 um 10:58 PM schrieb Stoiko Ivanov:
> > Thanks for tackling this!
> > 
> > applied the patch for pve-common and played around a bit with pmgsh - and
> > yes - I did miss the completion (not the history though.. and am not sure
> > if I overlooked some other readline feature that would be lost)
> > 
> > but this reminded me of pvesh and that we dropped interactive mode at some
> > point (around PVE 5.2) there:
> > https://git.proxmox.com/?p=pve-manager.git;a=commitdiff;h=cfc6a662938b90069e6c70b8112021a4554bad27
> > and the rationale of using bash for completion (still) sounds sensible.  
> 
> Oh, that dropped the REPL-style interface completely. If we do want to
> go ahead with dropping Term::ReadLine for pmgsh, I think we should do
> that here too.

Dropping the REPL-style interface should be fine - AFAIK `pmgsh` is
certainly used by our user-base to script some changes, but I don't expect
anyone to use it for daily work (and not being happy of using with
bash-completion instead of the REPL)

Had a chat with Thomas off-list - and he correctly pointed out that
dropping Term::ReadLine as dependency can be a nice2have, but it does not
hurt us currently - so there is no rush in getting this in.

Fixing #6748 OTOH is something affecting users, and it's also independent
of changing pmgsh.

So I think it's definitely worth to include 1/2, 2/2 (and the patch for
pve-common independent of whether or not we bring changes from pvesh to
pmgsh)

> 
> > did not look closer at what pmgsh is still missing from pvesh (the latter
> > saw quite a bit more changes in the past years) - but currently this seems
> > to be a good alternative.
> > (I'm not sure if I'll get to checking this in the upcoming 1-2 weeks, but
> > could try if you are busy elsewhere and noone else steps up)  
> 
> Do you have an example for what (potential) features you have in mind
> here? Or just looking through all pvesh changes and see what would be
> nice to have for pmgsh too?
was thinking about looking at the pvesh changes - but from a quick look
one example is `get /nodes/<other node>/journal` (it returns an array and
we don't handle that yet in pmgsh).
This would all mostly be improvements to the current status - the one
thing that I'd consider a regression with your patch vs. w/o is the lack
of completion.

> 
> > FWIW - tried registering an acme account (patch 1/4) - also worked fine.  
> 
> Would you mind adding a T-b there :)?
sent for 1/4, 2/4 and the pve-common patch :)