[puppet: 1/2] Adding memcached selinux policy"

brett lentz wakko666 at gmail.com
Tue Sep 22 18:38:01 UTC 2009


On Tue, Sep 22, 2009 at 11:19 AM, Todd Zullinger <tmz at pobox.com> wrote:
> brett lentz wrote:
>> Why not just do this:
>>
>> if $memcached_maxconn { $maxconn = $memcached_maxconn } else {
>> $maxconn = 1024 }
>>
>> That's much more clear about what conditions set the default value.
>
> Is the puppet selector method that ugly/unfamiliar though?  It's used
> many places in puppet manifests, both in the infrastructure repos as
> well as in puppet documentation and other folks modules/manifests.

It's not so much the selector method, as the way it's being used.
Selectors just don't strike me as the right tool for this job.

Using both default and the empty string to assign different values
doesn't make it obvious what the intended results are (e.g. which is
chosen if the value is undef?). Not having any comments added to the
code to document intentions just makes it worse.

My question is less about what's syntactically valid, and more about
using code that is user-friendly and doesn't raise artificial barriers
for new infrastructure members. Knowing the inner-workings of puppet's
parser should not be a requirement for reading the manifests.

After all, if we wanted an obtuse, opaque way of managing systems,
we'd still be doing everything with perl scripts. ;-)

> --
> Todd        OpenPGP -> KeyID: 0xBEAF0CE3 | URL: www.pobox.com/~tmz/pgp
>

---Brett.




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