Re: Need 'UncommentAndSetValue' or some such

[Mark Burgess]

On Fri, 2005-10-28 at 12:15 +1000, Tim Nelson wrote:
> On Thu, 27 Oct 2005, David Scott Coburn wrote:
> 
> > Christopher Browne wrote:
> >>
> >> The "do something equivalent to assignment" is one of the "holy grail"
> >> sorts of things for some future release.
> >
> > If this is so why has it not appeared yet?
> 
>       Because the current 2.1.x is focussing on bugfixing now.  I'm 
> under the impression that plans are in the making for version 3.0 
> (although I'm always interested in status updates, Mark :) ).  My 
> suggestion (as anyone who examines the wiki can see) is to split editfiles 
> off into a separate language, and then use Action Templating to allow 
> people to embed any language they want in cfengine, whether Perl, 
> editfiles, or something else.

Actually there are not many bugs to fix in cfengine (except new ones
that I introduced in 2.1.16...) Most of the time lately has been spent
on planning cfengine 3. These plans will be presented at LISA and will
eventually appear more obviously on the website. Time is always short.

I definitely am against embedding other languages in cfengine. It
makes a nonsense of cfengine's contribution to scripting. Cfengine has
more carefully considered semantics/protocols/procedures for
implementation than people will write in an imperative script. That
needs to be visible in the config.

Cfengine 3 will be a rationalized answer to all the ideas on the wiki,
not a literal interpretation. It might still be useful as an interim
measure to add some more things to cf2.

M