On Thu, 2005-05-12 at 13:35, Mark Burgess wrote: > In version 3 I hope that all of this > will be handled more elegantly.
Another tantalizing, yet mysterious, intimation of better things to come. One might start thinking you had a background in marketing! Perhaps my concerns will be moot when cfengine 3 changes our current paradigms, but when discussions about the ordering of actions in cfengine become discussions about dependencies, I am really disappointed. While there is some overlap, they are different problems really, and the change in semantics really changes the implications and considerations. The last time dependencies came up as a solution to the limitations of the current actionsequence implentation, it appeared to me to be more of a nod to notions of PC-ness (Programming Correct-ness), than directed at solving the problems of system administrators, i.e., making cfengine even more flexible and easy to use. Brendan's [extremely well-articulated and demonstrated] examples for using class dependencies are interesting, but I'm not convinced that's the answer to actionsequence limitations. Imagine trying to implement your current actionsequence in terms of class dependencies! Granted, we might not care to reinvent the actionsequence, and sequence might not matter for much, even most, of what cfengine does. (But knowing it is determinate, and how, is often useful and important.) To me, it would be vastly easier, more powerful, and more flexible, to simply assign a priority to an action (or not, if it doesn't matter), and know immediately how it relates to ALL other actions, rather than have to define any relationships individually. I don't have to worry about breaking dependencies, or finding/fixing/maintaining relationships across many config files. It's easy to understand at a glance for the human and the machine parser. Multiple passes aren't required... (And concerns, if there are any, about performance optimizations that a dependency-based approach might offer, in my typical <10 second cfagent run, would be way at the bottom of my list.) Frankly, I prefer the status quo, to a solution based on defining dependencies, at least as I understand the idea now. -Ed _______________________________________________ Help-cfengine mailing list Help-cfengine@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-cfengine
