Re: Cfengine questionnaire

[Christopher Browne]

Quoth Mark.Burgess@iu.hio.no:
> I would appreciate it if you would spend the time to answer the
> questions as well as you can. The information will help me to improve
> cfengine in the coming years.

I can tell you up front what I'd most like to see...

I'd most like to see a way of doing some sort of "setvariable" scheme
analagous to editfiles for manipulating things that are
"parameterized."

If I have some property with an associated value, it is remarkably
difficult, at present, to indicate the need to change that value.

There are several approaches available; they involve a lot of, ah,
"circumlocutions."

I found a way to manage a set of Java properties that look like:

 property.subproperty.subsub.server=servername
 property.subproperty.subsub.port=5432
 property.subproperty.subsub.protocol=pg74

The "natural" way might be something like...
 editproperties:
 { /opt/app/something.properties
   delimiter="=" comment="#"

   property="property.subproperty.subsub.server"
   value=$(DATASERVER1)

   property="property.subproperty.subsub.port"
   value=5432

   property="property.subproperty.subsub.protocol"
   value=pg74
 }

Fiddling with host files could also take advantage of this:
 {/etc/hosts
  delimiter=whitespace comment="#"

  property="192.168.1.1"
  value="knuth knuth.cbbrowne.com cache www"
 }

There may be additional options that would be valuable in order to
make it more generally useful, but having even just the above strikes
me as the sort of "good enough 80% of the time" that it would get
_heavily_ used.

Having something like this that could be applied to portions of files
in much the manner of BeginGroup/EndGroup would be great for various
formats of files including many cases of XML and "Windows .ini" style
files...

But I digress...
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