feature request: bolt interactive mode about bolt

[LongLiveCHIEF]

Just my opinion here (and I'm not a collaborator/member of this project), but I think this is out of scope for bolt. There are tools out there to do this, and it seems contradictory to the nature of puppet (which bolt is designed to be utilized with).

Puppet is for automation, and bolt is a way to trigger that automation. If you've gotten to the point of needing interactions and prompts, you're no longer talking automation, and that feels like it no longer belongs.

[MikaelSmith]

I agree that this seems fairly different from the use-cases Bolt is targeting. I don't see an argument for why adding this to Bolt would be any better than just using hostctl or similar tools.

[scoopex]

My intention for this feature request was that the described helps for the following situations:

• if something went wrong with a number of hosts, this simplifies the problem inspection
• i often perform canary tests to find problems with automation code, after a number of hosts i can change to unattended execution
• this helps to manage critical automation tasks (like distribution upgrades) in a half-automated way

I really love bolt, and these feature seems to be the last remaining part to eliminate all the insufficient cluster-execution / cluster-shell tools i used in the last years

[scoopex]

Probably it would be a good idea to split this three parts:

• #102 - streaming of stderr/stdout output
• support for canary runs with user interaction with : (c)ontinue to next host, (r)etry command, (s)hell invocation, (q)uit
• support for non paralleled interactive shell sessions with interaction over stdin, stderr, stdout

What do you think?

[MikaelSmith]

(1) seems doable. (2) I think continue, retry, quit make sense, shell invocation starts to feel like a substantial investment in a new direction, which (3) continues. I can see how interactive shells using inventory would be valuable, but I don't see my team going in that direction any time soon. Maybe we could get there by invoking a separate tool to handle the interactive session?

[lucywyman]

This is captured by #102, which is being worked on in #625 - going to close as a duplicate