CONTRIBUTING.md

Contributing

Each command defined in the IPMI specification is a pair of request/response messages. These IPMI commands are implemented as methods of the ipmi.Client struct in this library.

ipmitool as example, some ipmitool cmdline are realized by calling just one underlying IPMI command, but many others are not. Like ipmitool sdr list, it's a loop of GetSDR IPMI command.

So this library also implements some methods that are not IPMI commands defined in IPMI sepcification, but just some common helpers, like GetSDRs to get all SDRs.

IPMI Command Guideline

For a IPMI Command DoSomething:

• Must define DoSomethingRequest which conforms to the ipmi.Request interface, it holds the request message data.
• Must define DoSomethingResponse which conforms to the ipmi.Response interface, it holds the response message data.
• Must define DoSomething method on ipmi.Client

For DoSomething method, you can pass DoSomethingRequest directly as the input parameter, like:

func (c *Client) DoSomething(request *DoSomethingRequest) (response *DoSomethingResponse, err error) {
  response := &DoSomethingResponse{}
  err := c.Exchange(request, response)
  return
}

or, you can pass some plain parametes, and construct the DoSomethingRequest in method body, like:

func (c *Client) DoSomething(param1 string, param2 string) (response *DoSomethingResponse, err error) {
  request := &DoSomethingRequest{
    // construct by using input params
  }
  response := &DoSomethingResponse{}
  err := c.Exchange(request, response)
  return
}

Calling Exchange method of ipmi.Client will fullfil all other complex underlying works.

ipmi.Request interface

type Request interface {
	// Pack encodes the object to data bytes
	Pack() []byte
	// Command return the IPMI command info (NetFn/Cmd).
	// All IPMI specification specified commands are already predefined in this file.
	Command() Command
}

ipmi.Response interface

type Response interface {
	// Unpack decodes the object from data bytes
	Unpack(data []byte) error
	// CompletionCodes returns a map of command-specific completion codes
	CompletionCodes() map[uint8]string
	// Format return a formatted human friendly string
	Format() string
}