pgagroal command refactoring

It took me more than one year to get this patch in! The reason was not that this piece of code is particularly complex, rather it is hitting pretty much all the human interface pgagroal is exposing to the user. When I started using pgagroal I felt uncomfortably with its command line interface. Commands had been added as the project improved, but there was not a clear grouping of related commands, and most of them have weird meaning, at least to me. As an example, the reset command was dealing with the Prometheus reset, while reset-server was truly dealing with pgagroal reset. That sounded weird to me, since I believe pgagroal should deal first with itself, and then with other components, so the order of the commands appeared wrong to me. Another example was the flush-xxx set of commands: flush-gracefully, flush-all and flush-idle. Why not grouping those commands into a big flush group and then add as a parameter what to effectively flush? You probably get the point behind my rants. That’s why I started to develop this patch in to refactor the command line of pgagroal-cli and pgagroal-admin to:

• have command groups
• provide more concise and sane defaults
• handle commands and subcommands, like git and other command line oriented tools do.

Since this change would have broke the command line, I decided also to place warnings and accept the old commands. Therefore I developed this patch with the option to parse the new set of commands, as well as the old ones, printing out a warning if the user was still using the old ones. This makes retro-compatibility easy, and pushes the user towards the new set of commands to prevent that the future removal of the old commands will break some external tools or scripts. I’m not going to discuss the whole set of new commands, since the documentation already does this task. However, just to give you an idea about how the command now looks like, consider the flsuh commands:



As you can see, the new command is just flush and it accepts a subcommand that can either be idle, all, gracefully and is used to specify the mode to execute the flush command. This also introduces a new default behavior: if the user does not specify how to flush, the graceful mode is automatically selected. If the user types in the old command, pgagroal-cli will emit a warning like the following:



In this way, we keep compatibility with previous versions while trying to teach the users the new way to execute a command. Sooner or later, old commands will be removed! Therefore users should start updating their tools and scripts to the new interface. The conf set of commands is probably the one that groups the most subcommands. In fact, the conf command includes the set, the get and reload commands that were respectively config-set, config-get and reload. Note how the reload subcommand now makes it clearer what is going to be reloaded (i.e., the conf). In other words, according to me, pgagroal-cli conf reload is much clearer and less error prone than pgagroal-cli reload. Some commands changed their name, and this was due to a clash in the default actions. For example, the reset and reset-prometheus commands have been moved into the clear group, with clear server (the default) and clear prometheus respectively. Similarly, also pgagroal-admin has been updated, so that for instance pgagroal-admin add-user is now pgagroal-admin user add. Thanks to the very well structured pgagroal source code, and to the introduction of a few new utility functions to handle command line arguments, these changes will allow the introduction to new commands and groups with a more consistent command line experience!