Allow URLs in $MACHINEFEATURES and $JOBFEATURES

[Andrew-McNab-UK]

This patch allows one or both of the environment variables to contain URLs rather than local directories. If so, the remote directories are parsed with HTMLParser to find the key names and the dictionaries created as normal. It also has self._collect() in _run() which I needed to make the command line mjf work.

[roiser]

Hi Andrew,

thanks for the patch, in principal this is also what I intended, just that the values should be retrieved as a json from couchdb instead of plain apache. The advantage would be that we can have a web interface to the information (couchdb provides this to us) and also in a later stage of bi-directional communication, the clients could write back simply via HTTP PUT into couchdb. It would only require marginal changes for what you have committed. Could you agree on such a change?

Also if you like to play with the current infrastructure there is one available at CERN, I can give you admin user/password so you can populate and retrieve information from there if you would like to play with it.

cheers
Stefan

[roiser]

for the other fix _run() in _collect() that's all fine with me.