Re: "tidy" not deleting files from the future

[Paul Krizak]

Unfortunately, it's the time syncronization that's causing the problem. 
 When the clock gets synced immediately after the system is installed 
(anaconda/kickstart doesn't support setting time via ntp before 
installing packages), then the atime/mtime/ctime of all the files on the 
hard disk are then out of sync with the "real" time.

If we didn't do an ntpdate at all, then the tidy would work fine, since 
the hardware clock and the date of the files on the disk would match up.

This issue causes us many headaches (not just in cfengine) and we wish 
there was some better way.

Also, I'd prefer to avoid special-casing "one-time-only" changes to a 
system.  What if somehow that file re-appears, say due to an RPM getting 
installed?  Then cfengine would be powerless to delete it, since the 
system is not being "freshly" installed.

The real thrust of what I'm trying to accomplish with this e-mail thread is:

1.) does "tidy" have a "force" mode (or equivalent) that ignores the 
date on the file?

2.) if not, could this be added into a future version of cfengine?

Paul Krizak                         5900 E. Ben White Blvd. MS 625
Advanced Micro Devices              Austin, TX  78741
Linux/Unix Systems Engineering      Phone: (512) 602-8775
Microprocessor Solutions Sector


Ed Brown wrote:
> With 'scaling' being your number one issue (Mr. 10,000-clients), it's
> hard to know how any solution will fit, but here's one more suggestion
> for what it's worth.  If you use something like a 'NewBuild' or
> 'InitialRun' or some such class to distinguish the first time cfengine
> runs, you could just run that shellcommand once.  Or you could force
> your time into synchronization before any other action, and just leave
> your tidy as-is.
>
> -Ed  
>
>
> On Tue, 2005-12-13 at 14:57, Paul Krizak wrote:
>
> > yeah that's not exactly what I'm looking for either.  It doesn't scale