Re: Need 'UncommentAndSetValue' or some such

[Jamie Wilkinson]

This one time, at band camp, Brian C. Hill wrote:
>       I tend to agree. Cannonical edit directives are concise and
>clean (pretty, even?), but they will only take you so far. I mark up
>all of my config files (resolv.conf, ntp.conf, automount configs,
>/etc/system, syslog.conf, etc.) with m4. xml might be a better choice
>in the long run, but m4 has worked well for me across a large number of
>systems with different subnets, domains, roles, timezones, etc..
>
>       I am using cfe to replace rdist now, making heavy use of
>copy:/shellcommands:. I am considering using some of the cfe mount and
>resolver functionality to replace what I am doing (which will obsolete
>the m4 files for those), but that's just a couple of pieces.
>
>       Is anyone else using a markup language to 'templatize' their
>config files? This is slightly off-topic - probably better to reply to
>me directly.

I started with M4 to do most of my editfiles, then it grew to include doing
things like package installs, system user creation, and finally when I
realised I needed to do stuff in two sections at once (for example,
processes and shellcommands) for one high-level action, I found M4 too
hideous to do it and started a rewrite in Python, which I gather might be
similar to Tim Nelson's cfperl.  My Python stuff now looks kinda like SCons
to use, and generates regular cfengine inputs, so it feels like you're
programming python (groups and control variables turn into python objects,
so you can describe the system fairly eloquently, and the generator does the
right thing when it creates stuff for cfengine to use.)

It's not currently available, mainly due to time constraints, but if people
are interested (and they'd prefer a python option to perl) let me know.