Re: cfengine and revision control

[Sami J. Mäkinen]

Josh Lothian wrote:
> 2) This is the bigger problem in our environment.  Defining myhostname
> will get you the user-defined classes, however you'll miss out on all the
> operating system based classes.  We've got a bunch of AIX and a bunch of
> Linux here, and I'd like to have some files that are different between
> them, without having to specify somewhere that host X is running OS Y.
> I don't know of any good way to solve this problem, unless you already
> generate that information and store it centrally.

Errr, you could, maybe, use both server-side and client-side
overlay directories. I admit, it is ugly and maybe clumsy
and complicated to support in the long run.

OK, you could set up a "feedback" channel so that each client
tells the master server which OS they run and what hard classes
are defined. You can then generate a more elaborate hostname.conf
that includes all that. It seems to me that this is even more
complicated and error-prone than using both client-side and
server-side overlay directories.

Anyway, I bet you might not have any sensitive information
in OS dependent stuff, so client-side customization should
not be an issue. On the other hand, sudoers/passwd/shadow/etc
is not usually OS dependent and could be processed server-side.

-sjm