I am relaying this to the list in case anyone else gets bitten. I
can't take any credit for the solution; heffer on #cobbler had already
worked through this.
In my case, the symptom was that when I tried to generate kickstarts,
if there were any $SNIPPET macros in the kickstart template, I would
see the following behaviour:
[root@yoda-1 Cheetah]# cobbler system getks --name=jedi000
# *** ERROR ***
#
# There is a templating error preventing this file from rendering correctly.
#
# This is most likely not due to a bug in Cobbler and is something you can fix.
#
# Look at the message below to see what things are causing problems.
#
# (1) Does the template file reference a $variable that is not defined?
# (2) is there a formatting error in a Cheetah directive?
# (3) Should dollar signs ($) be escaped that are not being escaped?
#
# Try fixing the problem and then investigate to see if this message goes
# away or changes.
#
#
# SNIPPET() takes exactly 2 arguments (1 given)
# File "/usr/lib/python2.7/site-packages/cobbler/templar.py", line
121, in render
# data_out = t.respond()
#
# File "cheetah_DynamicallyCompiledCheetahTemplate_1288193687_92_18157.py",
line 258, in respond
#
# File "cheetah_DynamicallyCompiledCheetahTemplate_1288193687_92_18157.py",
line 84, in __errorCatcher3
#
# File "<string>", line 1, in <module>
#
heffer tracked it down to this Cheetah commit:
http://github.com/rtyler/cheetah/commit/43d7cbe361a3fe73dc20337e544144b8c...
If you remove the lines added by that commit, then things work better.
I don't pretend to understand this problem beyond that, though, so
either cobbler or cheetah may need to be further modified to
differently attack the problem that commit was addressing.
--
Chad M. Huneycutt