Hi Karl, thanks for reaching out - there seems to be some understandable confusion around this announcement, I've added a few responses inline.
On Wednesday, 8 July 2015 07:42:53 UTC-7, Karl MacMillan wrote: > > Hey Andrew - a few questions. > > On Jul 8, 2015, at 3:16 AM, 'Andrew Jessup' via Google App Engine < > google-a...@googlegroups.com <javascript:>> wrote: > > Hi folks, > > We're making an important change to the Google Cloud SDK to simplify how > App Engine developers can access and work with the SDK. > > As of the next release, 0.9.68, of the Google Cloud SDK - we will no > longer be distributing the stand alone App Engine SDKs. > > > Can you give us a timeframe for this release? Many of us probably have > some automation around these tools (I certainly do) and it would be nice to > be able to plan when we need to make the changes. Especially as this kind > of work provides no benefit for me or my users, so it’s not a high priority. > We expect this release to be available in the next couple of days, although occasionally delays come up. I absolutely hear you that this is a pain for automation. We're aiming to minimize breaking changes once we remove the 'preview' label from the gcloud app command, which is why we're doing this now. In the interim, the version pinning described below is one way to minimize the effect/surprise changes when using the Google Cloud SDK. > > Also - I just had some interaction with the support team over the urlfetch > bug and they were discussing which of the next two GAE SDK releases the bug > might be fixed in. Does that mean that there are going to be at least two > more releases of the stand-alone SDK? Or does this announcement change > that? > We're going to keep distributing the stand-alone SDKs (that is the SDKs not shipped in gcloud) for the forseeable future, this announcement doesn't affect them. What this refers to is the copy of appcfg.py/.sh and and dev_appserver.py/.sh that are bundled with the Google Cloud SDK. > > Basically - I don’t quite understand how the release schedule of what (to > me) are two different SDKs interact. Heck - I’m not even quite clear on how > these two SDKs are intended to interact at all (more on that below). > > The gcloud preview app deploy and gcloud preview app run commands that > most developers use within gcloud will continue to work, users should not > notice any obvious change. > > > You say that most users use the gcloud commands, but I find that very hard > to believe. All of your docs point to the old tools (e.g., > https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/python/gettingstartedpython27/uploading > > and https://cloud.google.com/appengine/docs/java/tools/uploadinganapp). > Also your gcloud docs explicitly state that these tools are beta and not > covered by “any SLA or deprecation policy and may be subject to > backward-incompatible changes” (https://cloud.google.com/sdk/gcloud-app). > Ah, there might be some confusion here. I was referring to the fact that most users *of the Google Cloud SDK <https://cloud.google.com/sdk/>* to interact with GAE are using "gcloud app run/deploy" rather than the appcfg.py/dev_appserver.py commands. However, you're quite right - most users of App Engine right now are not yet using the Google Cloud SDK at all, but are using the stand-alone App Engine SDKs <https://cloud.google.com/appengine/downloads> and are using the appcfg.py/.sh and dev_appserver.py/.sh commands from there. Fortunately these folks aren't affected by this announcement, this only applies to those using appcfg.py/.sh and dev_appserver.py/.sh *from the Google Cloud SDK*. Using the stand-alone App Engine SDKs, and the tools therein, is still the recommended path for interacting with App Engine for anyone not using Managed VMs. > > Call me a fuddy-duddy, but I tend to stick to what you guys document as > the correct way and avoid things that are in beta and you tell me are not > yet supported. Needless to say I’m surprised and annoyed for this casual > message from you to change all of that without any change to the public > documentation. > > Also, will these continue to be under the preview command (which I > understood to mean were not yet stable)? If these are going to be the only > supported means of interacting with GAE it seems surprising that they are > going to be in preview still. If they are going to change it would be nice > to have one release where the commands are not in preview but the > standalone tools are still supported to ease our migration and just in case > there are bugs / breaking changes. Otherwise there is no period where I can > migrate my automation _and_ use tools that are officially supported. > We will continue shipping the current (non-beta) tooling using the stand-alone SDKs as we currently do, it's only distribution via gcloud that is affected. We plan to continue shipping these tools in stand-alone SDKs for the forseeable future. > > For users who were directly using appcfg.py, appcfg.sh, dev_appserver.py > or dev_appserver.sh scripts, or the GUI launchers that were bundled with > the Google Cloud SDK, you have two options: > > You can continue to use the latest versions of these tools used by > installing them from the stand-alone App Engine SDKs that can be found here: > https://cloud.google.com/appengine/downloads. > > > Just to make certain that I understand - are you saying that we can use > the existing releases and there will be no more releases? Your wording is a > little confusing to me. > We will under the stand-alone App Engine SDKs. We won't continue to release these tools in under the Google Cloud SDK. > > In the short term, if you need to prevent this from happening, you can > pin a version of gcloud SDK with the following commands: > > gcloud config set --scope=installation > component_manager/fixed_sdk_version 0.9.67 > gcloud components update > > > And what happens if I have the standalone SDK installed and don’t do this? > Are the standalone tools deleted? > Tools installed via the stand-alone SDK are unaffected by this. They will continue to work, and we'll keep updating them. > Again - I’m a little vague about the relationship between these. When I > first started I installed the standalone App Engine SDK but, when I needed > google compute, I installed gcloud. Since then I’ve installed updates > through gcloud, the GUI Google Updater, and manually when I had to > downgrade because of bugs. > > So does gcloud manage the existing App Engine SDK or not? How can I tell > for other members of my team? > As of this upcoming release - no. The stand alone App Engine SDKs however *will* continue to provide (and update) the appcfg.py and dev_appserver.py commands, the Google Cloud SDK will continue to provide gcloud preview app and gcloud preview deploy (and hopefully soon we can drop the 'preview' label from these). > > As part of this change, the gae-java, gae-python, gae-php, and gae-go > components no longer exist in the component manager. The `gcloud preview > app run` command will install language specific runtime libraries on > demand, as needed by your application. > > If you have questions or concerns, please let us know. > > > I’d like to go ahead and ask that you reconsider this plan. It does not > seem well thought out. I’d expect that you at least provide a solid > description of time frames and deprecation schedule. > I'm sorry for the confusion here. Ironically, part of the motivation for changing gcloud now is so that we can provide a more stable (and more quickly released) support for App Engine customers from gcloud down the line. If this is affecting your team severely you're welcome to reach out to me directly - jes...@google.com, and we'll see if we can help out. We're also open to feedback on how we can improve notifications on gcloud changes generally. We have a few improvements planned for the gcloud infrastructure (including release track splitting) that will help with this. > > Karl > > Thanks, > > Andrew, on behalf of the Cloud SDK team > Andrew Jessup | Product Manager, Google Cloud Platform | > jes...@google.com <javascript:> > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "Google App Engine" group. > To unsubscribe from this group and stop receiving emails from it, send an > email to google-appengine+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com <javascript:>. > To post to this group, send email to google-a...@googlegroups.com > <javascript:>. > Visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine. > To view this discussion on the web visit > https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/google-appengine/CAEF6f2tMjbP%3DeEcBuB5p2ubscWjsR8RHmoPUvnNopxZxydhEBw%40mail.gmail.com > > <https://groups.google.com/d/msgid/google-appengine/CAEF6f2tMjbP%3DeEcBuB5p2ubscWjsR8RHmoPUvnNopxZxydhEBw%40mail.gmail.com?utm_medium=email&utm_source=footer> > . > For more options, visit https://groups.google.com/d/optout. > > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "Google App Engine" group. 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