On 17 Sep 2010, at 10:15 am, Mark Burgess wrote: > David, the problem is one of semantics. In bulk operations, some things > succeed and some > fail. You are entirely slave to the behaviour of the package manager, making > it difficult > to have a consistent behaviour that everyone can agree on. Installing one by > one is > inefficient, but possible. > > Try to think more about the final (desired) state rather than the outcome of > the shell > command.
To some extent I agree with Davide that cfengine is deliberately discarding useful information here, and that can't be a good thing, surely? Particularly if it then goes on to behave as though the promise was fulfilled (although I do understand that the promise was fulfilled in the sense of "I passed the message on"). It seems it's a case of understanding what a package installation promise is actually promising. Davide is reading it as "I promise to install this package" whereas cfengine is making a slightly lesser promise, which is "I promise to ask the local package manager to install this package". I expect it will be a common misunderstanding - most system administrators would probably instinctively interpret it the way Davide has, although your documentation as quoted by Davide can be interpreted either way. "cfengine promises nothing about the outcome of executing a command" is fairly clear. The issue is with the phrase "using the results in good faith"; in my view the exit status of a command is just as valid a result of that command as the standard output. Ignoring the exit status to my mind means cfengine is not "using the results", it's ignoring some of them. Just my view - I expect Mark disagrees. :-) Tim -- The Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute is operated by Genome Research Limited, a charity registered in England with number 1021457 and a company registered in England with number 2742969, whose registered office is 215 Euston Road, London, NW1 2BE. _______________________________________________ Help-cfengine mailing list Help-cfengine@cfengine.org https://cfengine.org/mailman/listinfo/help-cfengine
