Raku-Utils Proposal

Sparrow is a Raku based automation tool comes with the idea of Sparrow plugins – small reusable pieces of code, runs as a command line or Raku function.

Raku:

my %state = task-run "say name", "name", %(
  bird => "Sparrow"
);

say %state<name>;

Cli:

$ s6 --plg-run name@bird=Sparrow

One can even create wrappers for existing command line tools converting them into Raku functions:

Wrapper code:

$ cat task.bash

curl $(config args)

Raku function:

task-run ".", %(
  args => [
    ['fail','location'],
    %(
      "output" => "data.html"
    );
    'http://raku.org'
  ]
);

Wrappers for Raku modules command line scripts

Many Raku modules author nowadays ship their distributions with command line tools to provide handy console functionality for theirs modules.

It’s relatively easy to repackage those tools into Sparrow plugins. For example for App::Mi6 module mi6 tool:

task-run "mi6 release", "raku-utils-mi6", %(

  args => [
    'release',
    ['verbose'],
    %(
      jobs => 2
    )
  ]

);

Sparrow wrapper:

$ task.bash

mi6 $(config args)

$ cat sparrow.json
{
    "name" : "raku-utils-mi6",
    "description" : "mi6 cli",
    "version" : "0.0.1",
    "category" : "utils"
}

$ depends.raku

App::Mi6

The last file is needed so that Sparrow could install Raku module dependency during plugin installation.

So eventually we might have a repository of raku-utils plugins for every Raku module exposing command line interface:

$ s6 --search raku-utils

One day, I might create a script that would download all zef distributions, sorting out those having bin/ scripts and create Sparrow wrappers for all of them. That would add a dozens of new plugins to existing Sparrow eco system at no cost.

And this would make it available to run those scripts as pure Raku functions, using Sparrow plugins interface!

Conclusion

I’ve introduced the idea of adding Sparrow plugins for existing Raku commad line tools shipped as a part of Raku modules.

I’d happy to get a feedback on that.

Thanks

Alexey

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