Re: editfiles template; multiple edits; setting a class on update

[Brendan Strejcek]

Russell Adams wrote:

> I think everyone ought to learn m4. It simplifies things immensely.

<offtopic>

I'm not sure I agree. Everyone interested in understanding the
traditional Unix tool set should learn m4, because it is ubiquitous.
But it has some limitations that are pretty nasty, such as escaping
characters and quotation (which do not behave in an intuitive way).

In the context of system management, everybody should think about
templating and preprocessing, but I can't really recommend m4 as a
templating tool. I do still use m4 in my cfengine config, but it feels
brittle, and I doubt anyone else at my site really understands it.
There are several other templating engines out there, such as Perl's
Text::Template. I have actually found that php is one of the most
flexible and maintainable general preprocessors.

</offtopic>