Yesterday I wrote a calm rational explanation for why I'm not building tools around 'zpool status' any more and said that it ended up being only half of the story. The other half is that I am genuinely angry that ZFS still does not have any semblance of an API, so angry that I've decided to stop cooperating with ZFS's non-API and make my own.

(It's not the hot anger of swearing, it's the slow anger of a blister that keeps reminding you about its existence with every step you take.)

For at least the past six years it has been blindingly obvious that ZFS should have an API so that people could build additional tools and solutions on top of it. For all that is sane, stock ZFS doesn't even have an alerting solution for pool problems. You can't miss that unless you're blind and say whatever you want about the ZFS developers, I'm sure that they're not blind. I am and have been completely agnostic about the exact format that this API could have taken, so long as it existed. Stable, documented, script-friendly output from ZFS tools? A documented C level library API? XML information dumps because everyone loves XML? A web API? Whatever. I could have worked with any of them.

Instead we got nothing. We got nothing when ZFS was with Sun and despite some vague signs of care we continue to get exactly nothing now that ZFS is effectively with Illumos (and I'm pretty sure that Oracle hasn't fixed the situation either). At this point it is clear that the ZFS developers have different priorities and in an objective sense do not care about this issue.

(Regardless of what you say, what you actually care about is shown by what you work on.)

This situation has thoroughly gotten under my skin now that moving to OmniOS is rubbing my nose in it again. So now I'm through with tacitly cooperating with it by trying to wrestle and wrangle the ZFS commands to do what I want. Instead I feel like giving 'zpool status' and its friends a great big middle finger and then throwing them down a well. The only thing I want to use them for now is as a relatively authoritative source of truth if I suspect that something is wrong with what my own tools are showing me.

(I call zpool status et al 'relatively authoritative' because it and other similar commands leave things out and otherwise mangle what you are seeing, sometimes in ways that cause real problems.)

I will skip theories about why the ZFS developers did not develop an API (either in Sun or later), partly because I am in a bad mood after writing this and so am inclined to be extremely cynical.