Re: [Cfengine-develop] Development plan / meeting

[Luke A. Kanies]

On Thu, 27 Feb 2003 address@hidden wrote:

> I would like to avoid too much email - I get enough already, and part
> of the reason for delegating and enlisting help is to get away from
> the computer. We have options:
>
>  - a workshop to kickstart development (where? when?)

I'm hesitant about this because it would probably be LISA at the earliest,
and I would like to start work earlier than that.

>  - a purely e-mail discussion that converges quickly (like a
>    good cfengine policy) to a concise plan

I also liked the earlier mention of IRC as a medium between email and a
workshop.  We could possibly have short, periodic IRC meetings until we
feel that we've reached stability in terms of the goals of the project and
our progress towards those goals.

> My broad goals with compatibility:
>
>  * objects with scope (self-contained cfengine sub-routines)
>     - cfengine 2.1.0, main problem is how to express this possiblity in the
>       cfengine language, preserving convergence, even with recursion
>
>  * a model for peer 2 peer policy exchange
>     - cfengine 2.2.0, requires research and simulation
>
> Goals abandoning compatibilty
>
>  * Redesign/simplification of language and parser

I like these goals, and obviously (else I wouldn't be here) have a few of
my own.  I especially like the p2p policy exchange, and would like
to see more full-language function in the cfservd daemon.  Probably
towards the very top of my list would be:

-> a list data type and iterative operators/functions to go with that
-> the ability to define variables anywhere in a config, not just the control 
section
-> the ability to use tests like IsDefined() as an lvalue to '::'
-> just generally, better support for decoupling of what is done from how
it is done, such as having a file defining all cron jobs that could be
anywhere on any system, then selectively enabling those cron jobs
throughout the config, and then finally verifying that all of the
configured cron jobs are actually setup

>From what I can tell from studying the cfengine code, especially the
parser and lexer, most of this would be relatively difficult to accomplish
without significant change in the parsing portion.  I'm not the most
experienced programmer, though, so I could easily be incorrect.

And I'm in Nashville, TN.

-- 
    "What is the sound of Perl?  Is it not the sound of a wall that
     people have stopped banging their heads against?"
                --Larry Wall in <address@hidden>