Brandon Allbery writes: > On Sat, Nov 7, 2015 at 6:26 PM, Josh Smift <iril...@infersys.com> wrote: > > Cfengine and probably Puppet too (I've forgotten > whether Puppet, at the time I was using it, could edit files like this). > > I think it eventually did sprout that capability although they strongly > resisted it for a long time.
For Puppet usually the recommendation has been to use augeas for in-place config file editing. augeas is kind of complicated, but also syntax-aware so overall it isn't really harder to use augeas compared to coming up with truly reliable sed scripts (or whatever) for in-place editing, especially in config formats that aren't structured around single lines of text. The problem with in-place editing is that while it can preserve parts of the configuration file that you don't need to change, you also can't really depend on those other parts of the file being the way you want them to be. One of the goals of effective configuration management is to record and control all relevant aspects of your system configuration, and in-place config editing does not accomplish that -- it does not record the complete configuration, and it does not control all aspects of that configuration. _______________________________________________ Tech mailing list Tech@lists.lopsa.org https://lists.lopsa.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/tech This list provided by the League of Professional System Administrators http://lopsa.org/
