Currently, Beaker's powerful hardware filtering capabilities are difficult to learn to use effectively. While improving the documentation is highly desirable in the long run, there's a simpler near term solution: provide support for predefined host filters in the command line interface, and ship a useful set of predefined filters. This serves two purposes: the filters should be useful in their own right, and they also serve as examples for anyone wanting to create their own filters.
Bumping the priority on this, as I think the richness of the Beaker hardware inventory feature is difficult for folks that haven't already *used* Beaker to grasp, yet it is also its single most salient feature when distinguishing it not only from generic virtual-only software testing systems, but also from services like MAAS and OnMetal that only offer very rudimentary hardware filtering capabilities. Adding this feature will thus serve a few purposes: - drastically lower the barrier to entry to making use of the hardware filtering capabilities by letting experienced Beaker users maintain the list of predefined filters, while new users just need to be able to look up the filter's names - provide example queries that make it easier to learn what hardware filtering options are available - make the richness of Beaker's hardware filtering capabilities obvious just by looking at the list of filters that are available (for ease of maintenance, this list could initially just be a literal inclusion of the filter definition file in the documentation - in future, a prettier table could be automatically generated for the docs from the filter definitions)
Proposing for 0.18 - will review that proposal in the next sprint planning meeting.
http://gerrit.beaker-project.org/#/c/3176/
Forgot something: http://gerrit.beaker-project.org/#/c/3182/1
As per comment 9.
Beaker 0.18.0 has been released.