Re: Is this quirky for a simple copy, editfiles operation?

[Brendan Strejcek]

Mark Burgess wrote:

> It will be replaced with an action list, so that you can switch things
> on and off, but the need for an order will go away.

I think that even this is unnecessarily complicated. If you want
to switch an action off, you can wrap it with a class that won't
be defined, or just comment it out. An action list sounds like an
"opt-in" situation, which seems to violate the principle of least
surprise to me (that is, if one writes an action, one expects it to be
implemented). What might be more useful is an anti-action list (the
"opt-out" analogue). So, rather than have the behavior be "do nothing
unless told to," it could be "do everything unless told not to." This
could be similar to the current cfagent options "--no-processes,"
"--no-copy," etc. though it would allow that information to be
encoded in the policy.

It seems to me that such exclusion will not be the common case though.