[Fab-user] contrib.files comment and uncomment behaving differently

[Dan Craig]

Hello all,

I'm new to Fabric, but have enjoyed learning it and look forward to using it for automating deployments.  Thanks for writing it.

In the process, I got hung up on the behavior of contrib.files.comment and uncomment.  I want to be able to uncomment and then later recomment a line from an Apache conf file.  The lines themselves contain regular expressions, so I passed them through re.escape() first before uncomment()/comment().  This works just fine on uncomment(), but fails on comment().  I traced the cause of this down contrib.files.sed's escaping of the before and after arguments, but not the limit.  In uncomment(), the line to uncomment is passed to sed as the limit, and thus not escaped, but in comment, the line is passed to sed as the before, which is escaped.

My workaround is to call uncomment like normal::

    uncomment(myfilename, re.escape("MyReContainingLine"))

but call comment like so::

   comment(myfilename, re.escape("MyReContainingLine").replace(r"\/", "/"))

This works, but seems wrong.  I'd expect uncomment and comment to be called in the same way.  OTOH, the escaping in sed is a nice convenience.  Thought I'd throw this out there in case it might be worth addressing.

Regards,
Dan Craig