Re: Need 'UncommentAndSetValue' or some such

[David Scott Coburn]

Christopher Browne wrote:
>
> The "do something equivalent to assignment" is one of the "holy grail"
> sorts of things for some future release.

If this is so why has it not appeared yet?

(Don't get me wrong, I can appreciate the complexities of programming,
and certainly the value of the time people donate to open source projects.)

It seems there are several camps here:

1) Those who just want this (seamingly) simple and basic capability.

2) Those who want this capability but want it to be much more capable
   or robust or customizable or some such (ie those who want a programming
   language embedded in cfengine).

3) Those who are willing to do the extra work of adding another layer
   of programming to their cfengine system (ie m4, perl, etc).

4) Those who think that letting cfengine edit config files is "evil".
   (No criticism of this view intended.)

I can see all of the above points of view.  #2 would certainly be nice.
#3 is a workaround (which I will probably pursue since #1 is not available).
#4 is probably true in a sense, but seems to be a matter of style, and how
and where you want to document your system's configuration.

But, if #1 was available you could use it, or not.

Scott

-- 
* David Scott Coburn
* Brookhaven National Laboratory
* scott@bnl.gov 631.344.7110
* "Assume a spherical cow of uniform density..."