Unfortunately this patch will break variable expansion without a major rewrite (cfengine 3). Sometimes variables are not defined when they are parsed -- and they are then parsed again later. A fatal error is too drastic a response to this.
This issue is tied together with lots of others. I don't think we should try a quick fix at this stage. M On Wed, 2005-07-13 at 00:33 -0700, Eric Sorenson wrote: > Tracker ID: [ 1236867 ] Failed variable expansion should be an error > > On Fri, 8 Jul 2005, Chip Seraphine wrote: > > > For about the one bajillionth time, I troubleshot a problem in my > > environment > > and it came back to some variable being undefined. Rather than put explicit > > tests (strcmps and whatnot) for every variable I ever set, I would be much > > happier if I could pass some sort of switch to cfengine that would cause it > > to > > simply fail with a useful error message whenever a variable went undefined > > rather than handling as a string that happens to begin with '$'. It is far > > safer and more secure to abort than to run commands with garbage inputs.... > > > > I'm quite comfortable using $(dollar) when I need to, so I can't think of a > > downside of tis... > > I found where this is happening, and it seems like it'd be easy to > croak on an undefined variable -- A Patch is attached. But I just made > this the default instead of adding YET ANOTHER getopt. This might be > too big of a change, if people are used to this silently succeeding (?!). > > On my test case, before the patch I ended up with a file named > /tmp/$(testvar) which, truly I can't imagine being the desired > behavior. It seems like fixing this would really be a good way to catch > typos and so forth. Does anybody on the list rely on the current behavior? > > Mark, any opinion? Should we croak on the use of an uninitialzed > variable? What was the original reasoning behind passing the variable > through as-is? (in the 'if varstring ...' section deleted in my patch) > > > > -- > - Eric Sorenson - N37 17.255 W121 55.738 - http://eric.explosive.net - > - Personal colo with a professional touch - http://www.explosive.net - _______________________________________________ Help-cfengine mailing list Help-cfengine@gnu.org http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/help-cfengine
