Collected notes from an attempt to onboard

[ddneilson]

As promised in the TSC meeting, this ticket contains some notes/observations that I made while attempting to set up a test deployment of OpenCue using the sandbox. I'm not suggesting any specific course of action; just sharing data on my stumbling blocks, with hopes that work items can be spun off from some of it.

In no particular order..

1. I ended up needing to configure the choice communication port between RQD & cuebot due to a port conflict with my test environment.
   1. There is no documentation that I could find that explains how to do this; in fact, I was unable to find any documentation on the command-line options or environment variables that are available to configure any component of OpenCue.
   2. cuebot lacks a command-line --help type option.
   3. Through code-spelunking, I was able to determine that the RQD's gRPC port is a hard-coded constant and not configurable without editing the source of RQD.
   4. I was able to find an environment variable to set for cuebot in the Dockerfile here: https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/OpenCue/blob/6999b9062650eb06e062e4aa3ca09330f83fc2b1/cuebot/Dockerfile#L58
2. The demo-data file appears to be the only available "documentation" regarding how to set up the initial data base contents, but it clearly contains more than just the bare minimum of data required to stand up a farm. Information, or a sample, on the bare minimum data would be wonderful.
3. The documentation makes it sound like RQD hosts join an "Allocation", however I was unable to find any way to assign an RQD host to an allocation via an RQD setting. Near as I can tell, you actually set the "Facility" and "Tag" of the host and the allocation is impled? Is that right?
4. I was unable to figure out how to add an "Allocation" to my farm configuration.
5. Some strangeness in the RQD source:
   1. A magic facility? https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/OpenCue/blob/6999b9062650eb06e062e4aa3ca09330f83fc2b1/rqd/rqd/rqconstants.py#L160
   2. Undocumentation way to configure RQD? https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/OpenCue/blob/6999b9062650eb06e062e4aa3ca09330f83fc2b1/rqd/rqd/rqconstants.py#L131
   3. Facility names must be exactly three alphanumeric characters? That's not documented. Why the constraint? https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/OpenCue/blob/6999b9062650eb06e062e4aa3ca09330f83fc2b1/rqd/rqd/rqconstants.py#L154
   4. Many hard-coded settings, with no way to configure most at runtime: https://github.com/AcademySoftwareFoundation/OpenCue/blob/master/rqd/rqd/rqconstants.py
6. The documentation would benefit from in-depth, detailed, sample(s) that discuss how studio(s) use the OpenCue abstractions (facility, tag, etc) in practice. Coming at it cold, it is not entirely clear how to map a desired setup to OpenCue; some discussions about how studios might use OpenCue would be beneficial.

[larsbijl]

Thank you @ddneilson for taking the time and providing this feedback, it is greatly appreciated!