Create `carti machine publish` command

[miltonjonat]

This command would produce a carti-machine.json from a Lua config

• Internally, the command would run carti bundle and then carti publish for each asset specified by the Lua config
• carti bundle parameters would be extracted from the config itself
• carti machine publish should accept and forward the same options that carti publish offers (s3, etc)

[zcstarr]

I think this is a useful idea, but there are a few problems here that make it difficult to have.

The main issue here is the way that publishing assets work in a coherent fashion aka s3 looks one way, ipfs another, swarm another, an ftp server even different. So we can't auto label the uris that these get loaded into.

I think maybe the way to accomplish this without hitting the problems would be

# this will convert machine-config.lua to machine.json this will also do a conversion of the drives to bundles
carti machine convert machine-config.lua

# this will list all the bundles that have not been published that referenced by machine.json
carti machine check 

# the user can then easily resolve to publish all the elements of the machine config

This I think gets 90% there in reality there probably won't be a huge burden for the user to specify the url stuff maybe 8 different drives max atm

[miltonjonat]

This is indeed the shakiest proposal I've made, I admit.

But I'm not sure I understand how carti machine check would be used to help the user publish the individual bundles. It would just list the local bundles?

I kind of imagined carti machine publish to do what you proposed for convert, and then also check. One idea I had was maybe for it to interactively ask specifics about how to publish an asset.

[zcstarr]

For me it's all about clarity 😁 so I think that conversion from lua to machine.json is just a different context than publish.

machine check - performs the task of saying that something in your machine.json is not associated with a published asset (disk or uri).

otherwise when you convert from lua to machine.json you have no idea what already exists and what doesn't. the CID in theory allows you to know that an asset has been published or not, because you can determine by CID if there is an associated filePath or uri that you know about.

It becomes up to the user to determine what to do about it, it's possible that they know it exists they're just on a new machine and references to those cids are publicly available. The cli can never have enough context to know.

[miltonjonat]

Ok, so check would just list the assets that need to be published, and then the user would manually decide what to do one by one right? Yeah, I get the idea. I'm just not sure if the user will often just forget to call check and accidentally share his carti-machine.json pointing at local assets. That would be the idea of a publish command that asks him to publish everybody.

But again, I admit this still feels shaky. Let's keep maturing this idea before taking action.