Greetings releng!

@puiterwijk and I came up with a glorious plan for Bodhi to give it a REST API to control mashing. This is needed in order to automate mass container rebuilds because Bodhi will need to be able to mash the lower layers into the registry before the higher layers that depend on them can be built. A REST API will allow automated services to ask Bodhi to do that when needed.

Giving Bodhi a REST API into the masher opens the possibility for a lot of other Nice Things™ for releng, such as a much better way to see the status of the masher than we have today. Aren't you tired of tailing the logs to see what the masher is doing, or looking for lock files in the mash directory? Wouldn't it be nice if a CLI or possibly even web interface could tell you what's up? This will even make it possible to give bodhi a web interface to control the masher.

Anyways, I'd like to solicit releng's feedback on the proposal. I have created a project for this that has all of the individual tickets that express the proposal in more detail than I've written here:

https://github.com/fedora-infra/bodhi/projects/2

The tickets are arranged from top to bottom in priority order. The tickets that are marked "high priority" mean that I am going to attempt to get them done by Feb 20 (no guarantees though!), and they are required for Bodhi to support containers. The remaining tickets I will pursue after that. Please peruse the various tickets, and please provide feedback in the tickets if you have any.

I filed this ticket so we could discuss it during one of your weekly meetings, if you like.