re: testing, alternate repositories, etc.

[Allen S. Rout]

Oh, BOY I love gmane.  

So, I've been working on a new cfengine installation in our unit, and
so I subscribed to the gmane cfengine group, and have semi-fresh
context about a half dozen discussions over the last 2-3 years about
some repository management tactics.


So here's one of them: It's a treatment of "How do I point (testing
box X) at a test repository without making that test repository
fundamentally different from the main one?".

If your test repository has an update.conf which is different from the
production one, you've got a sync problem.  I've solved this by
permitting a host to select an alternate policyhost.

In this way, the only things you need to change in the test repository
are the items under test; you do not need to also twiddle and
change-control update.conf, and you no longer have a risk of
accidentally committing a test update.conf to a production box.



control: actionsequence = ( copy ) # Keep this simple and constant
local_override = (
ReadArray(/var/cfengine/etc/local_override,textkey,",","#",1024) )

classes: 
        policyhost_overridden = ( isDefined(local_override[policyhost]) ) 

control:
    
        policyhost_overridden::
              policyhost = ( $(local_override[policyhost]) ) 
        !policyhost_overridden:: 
                policyhost = ( "whatever.production.policyhost" ) 



- Allen S. Rout