Quoth [EMAIL PROTECTED]: > 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... -- output = ("cbbrowne" "@" "gmail.com") http://cbbrowne.com/info/lisp.html Rules of the Evil Overlord #149. "Ropes supporting various fixtures will not be tied next to open windows or staircases, and chandeliers will be hung way at the top of the ceiling." <http://www.eviloverlord.com/> _______________________________________________ Help-cfengine mailing list Help-cfengine@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-cfengine