Specify description for boot commands

[jacob-carlborg]

It would be useful if there was a way to specify a description for each boot command in some way. Perhaps each entry in the boot_command array could be an array where the first element is the command and the second is the description. When logging is enabled (PACKER_LOG=1) Packer would output the description each time it outputs a boot command.

The use case is if an installation requires many steps, resulting in many boot commands, it's difficult to determine at which boot command Packer currently is. It's easy that the boot commands and the actual installation get out of sync and it would be really useful to know at which boot command Packer and the installation got out of sync. Here's an extract from the boot commands I'm using to install NetBSD:

boot_command = [
  "a<enter><wait5>", // Installation messages in English
  "a<enter><wait5>", // Keyboard type: unchanged

  "a<enter><wait5>", // Install NetBSD to hard disk
  "b<enter><wait5>", // Yes

  "a<enter><wait5>", // Available disks: sd0
  "a<enter><wait5>", // Guid Partition Table
  "a<enter><wait5>", // This is the correct geometry

The corresponding output procude by Packer when logging is enabled is:

2021/09/26 19:57:48 packer-builder-qemu plugin: Sending char 'a', code 0x61, shift false
2021/09/26 19:57:48 packer-builder-qemu plugin: Special code '<enter>' found, replacing with: 0xFF0D
2021/09/26 19:57:49 packer-builder-qemu plugin: [INFO] Waiting 5s
2021/09/26 19:57:54 packer-builder-qemu plugin: Sending char 'a', code 0x61, shift false
2021/09/26 19:57:54 packer-builder-qemu plugin: Special code '<enter>' found, replacing with: 0xFF0D
2021/09/26 19:57:54 packer-builder-qemu plugin: [INFO] Waiting 5s
2021/09/26 19:57:59 packer-builder-qemu plugin: Sending char 'a', code 0x61, shift false
2021/09/26 19:57:59 packer-builder-qemu plugin: Special code '<enter>' found, replacing with: 0xFF0D
2021/09/26 19:58:00 packer-builder-qemu plugin: [INFO] Waiting 5s
2021/09/26 19:58:05 packer-builder-qemu plugin: Sending char 'b', code 0x62, shift false
2021/09/26 19:58:05 packer-builder-qemu plugin: Special code '<enter>' found, replacing with: 0xFF0D
2021/09/26 19:58:05 packer-builder-qemu plugin: [INFO] Waiting 5s
2021/09/26 19:58:10 packer-builder-qemu plugin: Sending char 'a', code 0x61, shift false
2021/09/26 19:58:10 packer-builder-qemu plugin: Special code '<enter>' found, replacing with: 0xFF0D
2021/09/26 19:58:10 packer-builder-qemu plugin: [INFO] Waiting 5s
2021/09/26 19:58:15 packer-builder-qemu plugin: Sending char 'a', code 0x61, shift false
2021/09/26 19:58:16 packer-builder-qemu plugin: Special code '<enter>' found, replacing with: 0xFF0D
2021/09/26 19:58:16 packer-builder-qemu plugin: [INFO] Waiting 5s
2021/09/26 19:58:21 packer-builder-qemu plugin: Sending char 'a', code 0x61, shift false
2021/09/26 19:58:21 packer-builder-qemu plugin: Special code '<enter>' found, replacing with: 0xFF0D
2021/09/26 19:58:21 packer-builder-qemu plugin: [INFO] Waiting 5s

I've already added comments in the source file to help make it easier to understand which command corresponds to which step in the installation process. But looking at the out put, there's no easy way to correlate a command in the output back to the command in the source code. In this case, 6 out of 7 commands are the same: Sending char 'a', code 0x61, shift false.

[jacob-carlborg]

Duplicate of hashicorp/packer-plugin-sdk#216.

[github-actions]

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