Re: re my Terse Guide and cfengine doc in general

[Mark . Burgess]

> 
> I'm kinda disappointed that I can't find any documentation about
> how cfengine sometimes make multiple passes.  I seem to recall
> you said something like "the details are in the doc--you just
> need to know where to look".  I just did grep pass * | egrep -v
> 'passwd|password|passing|passed' on the .info files but that didn't
> turn up anything.  Any further info about this would be appreciated
> (but certainly not necessary.)  (See my post "re understanding
> cfengine "passes" on 18 Mar 2004.)



Cfagent is the workhorse of cfengine. It interprets and computes the necessary 
strategies
for implementing convergent maintenance. In order to carry out work efficiently,
the agent groups similar actions together. The order of these actions is 
goverened by
a list called the actionsequence.

In many cases, cfagent will be able to complete all its work in a single
pass of the actionsequence. However, in complex configurations, it is
hard to resolve all of the ordering dependencies automatically in a
single pass. Cfagent keeps track both of all actions that have been
performed and of those that might still need to be performed (given that
some actions depend on the later outcomes of others). If there is a
possibility that an action ordering dilemma might occur, it runs a
second pass of the actionsequence to more quickly resolve the dependency
(avoiding the wait for next scheduled run).  No actions are performed
twice however, since the agent checks off actions that have already been
performed to avoid unnecessary multiplicity.