tech stuff.

And — once again — cfengine has wasted part of my life.  I’ve never had more trouble with software than I’ve had with cfengine.  This time I had to delve into the source code to find the problem, and what I found hilights poor coding and even poorer testing.
Stop me if you’ve heard this one already…

For the life of my I can’t get the following editfiles snippet:

{ /etc/syslog-ng/syslog-ng.conf
LocateLineMatching "### Begin Section loghost ###"
UnCommentToLineMatching "### End .*"
}

To do what I expect on the following bit of syslog-ng.conf:

### Begin Section loghost ###
# source s_remote {
#     tcp(ip(0.0.0.0) port(514));
#     udp(ip(0.0.0.0) port(514));
# };
### End Section loghost ###

### Begin Section loghost_sys ###
# destination d_messages_byhost {
#     file("/var/log/$HOST/messages");
# };
#
# log { source(s_remote); destination(d_messages_byhost); };
### End Section loghost_web ###

I want it to only uncomment the first section.  What it does is uncomment the entire rest of the file.

Here’s some interesting debugging output:

Edit action: UnCommentToLineMatching
CommentToRegExp(list,#  ### End .*)
Uncomment line # source s_remote {
Uncomment line #     tcp(ip(0.0.0.0) port(514));
Uncomment line #     udp(ip(0.0.0.0) port(514));
Uncomment line # };
Terminating line: ### End Section loghost ### (Done)
Uncomment line # destination d_messages_byhost {
Uncomment line #     file("/var/log/$HOST/messages");
Uncomment line # };
Uncomment line #
Uncomment line # log { source(s_remote); destination(d_messages_byhost); };

It looks like it detects the correct line on which to Terminate, but then Uncomments the rest of the file anyway.

From UnCommentToRegExp() in item-ext.c (line 1282 in cfengine-2.2.8):

for (ip = CURRENTLINEPTR; ip != NULL; ip = CURRENTLINEPTR)
{
  if (ip == ip_end)
  {
    EditVerbose("Terminating line: %s (Done)\n",ip->name);
    done = true;
    }

“done” is a local variable that is not used anywhere else in UnCommentToRegExp().  Based on the incorrect function name in the Debug2() statement, I take it UnCommentToRegExp() was copied from CommentToRegExp() and the if (done) { break; } was lost somewhere along the way.  I attempted to see if this is also the case in cfengine-3.0.0a3, but UnCommentToRegExp() has been removed entirely, it seems.

This also raises a larger question — will cfengine-2.2 be bugfixed after 3.0.0 is released, or will I have to upgrade to 3.0.0 to fix this issue?  I certainly don’t want to upgrade to 3.0.0.  I’m there’ll be no limit to the number of bugs introduced in that major release.