I've been doing a little bit of dynamically typed programming in Haskell, to improve Propellor's Info type. The result is kind of interesting in a scary way.

Info started out as a big record type, containing all the different sorts of metadata that Propellor needed to keep track of. Host IP addresses, DNS entries, ssh public keys, docker image configuration parameters... This got quite out of hand. Info needed to have its hands in everything, even types that should have been private to their module.

To fix that, recent versions of Propellor let a single Info contain many different types of values. Look at it one way and it contains DNS entries; look at it another way and it contains ssh public keys, etc.

As an émigré from lands where you can never know what type of value is in a $foo until you look, this was a scary prospect at first, but I found it's possible to have the benefits of dynamic types and the safety of static types too.

The key to doing it is Data.Dynamic. Thanks to Joachim Breitner for suggesting I could use it here. What I arrived at is this type (slightly simplified):

newtype Info = Info [Dynamic]
    deriving (Monoid)

So Info is a monoid, and it holds of a bunch of dynamic values, which could each be of any type at all. Eep!

So far, this is utterly scary to me. To tame it, the Info constructor is not exported, and so the only way to create an Info is to start with mempty and use this function:

addInfo :: (IsInfo v, Monoid v) => Info -> v -> Info
addInfo (Info l) v = Info (toDyn v : l)

The important part of that is that only allows adding values that are in the IsInfo type class. That prevents the foot shooting associated with dynamic types, by only allowing use of types that make sense as Info. Otherwise arbitrary Strings etc could be passed to addInfo by accident, and all get concated together, and that would be a total dynamic programming mess.

Anything you can add into an Info, you can get back out:

getInfo :: (IsInfo v, Monoid v) => Info -> v
getInfo (Info l) = mconcat (mapMaybe fromDynamic (reverse l))

Only monoids can be stored in Info, so if you ask for a type that an Info doesn't contain, you'll get back mempty.

Crucially, IsInfo is an open type class. Any module in Propellor can make a new data type and make it an instance of IsInfo, and then that new data type can be stored in the Info of a Property, and any Host that uses the Property will have that added to its Info, available for later introspection.

For example, this weekend I'm extending Propellor to have controllers: Hosts that are responsible for running Propellor on some other hosts. Useful if you want to run propellor once and have it update the configuration of an entire network of hosts.

There can be whole chains of controllers controlling other controllers etc. The problem is, what if host foo has the property controllerFor bar and host bar has the property controllerFor foo? I want to avoid a loop of foo running Propellor on bar, running Propellor on foo, ...

To detect such loops, each Host's Info should contain a list of the Hosts it's controlling. Which is not hard to accomplish:

newtype Controlling = Controlled [Host]
    deriving (Typeable, Monoid)

isControlledBy :: Host -> Controlling -> Bool
h `isControlledBy` (Controlled hs) = any (== hostName h) (map hostName hs)

instance IsInfo Controlling where
    propigateInfo _ = True

mkControllingInfo :: Host -> Info
mkControllingInfo controlled = addInfo mempty (Controlled [controlled])

getControlledBy :: Host -> Controlling
getControlledBy = getInfo . hostInfo

isControllerLoop :: Host -> Host -> Bool
isControllerLoop controller controlled = go S.empty controlled
  where
    go checked h
        | controller `isControlledBy` c = True
        -- avoid checking loops that have been checked before
        | hostName h `S.member` checked = False
        | otherwise = any (go (S.insert (hostName h) checked)) l
      where
        c@(Controlled l) = getControlledBy h

This is all internal to the module that needs it; the rest of propellor doesn't need to know that the Info is using used for this. And yet, the necessary information about Hosts is gathered as propellor runs.

So, that's a useful technique. I do wonder if I could somehow make addInfo combine together values in the list that have the same type; as it is the list can get long. And, to show Info, the best I could do was this:

 instance Show Info where
            show (Info l) = "Info " ++ show (map dynTypeRep l)

The resulting long list of the types of vales stored in a host's info is not a useful as it could be. Of course, getInfo can be used to get any particular type of value:

*Main> hostInfo kite
Info [InfoVal System,PrivInfo,PrivInfo,Controlling,DnsInfo,DnsInfo,DnsInfo,AliasesInfo, ...
*Main> getInfo (hostInfo kite) :: AliasesInfo
AliasesInfo (fromList ["downloads.kitenet.net","git.joeyh.name","imap.kitenet.net","nntp.olduse.net" ...

And finally, I keep trying to think of a better name than "Info".