Undocumented feature: 'shellcommands' -> inform=false

[Hugo Gayosso]

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Nowhere in the documentation it says that you can enable/disable
"inform" in 'shellcommands'.

I previously had this:

shellcommands:
   MasterfilesServers::
      "/usr/bin/cvs -q update"  chdir=/var/masterconf


with the result that even if there was nothing to "update" in the CVS
tree, an email was sent by cfengine that looked like this:


cfengine:myhost: Executing script /usr/bin/cvs -q 
update...(timeout=0,uid=-1,gid=-1)
cfengine:myhost: Finished script /usr/bin/cvs -q update

and this is not what I wanted.


I looked on the mailing list archives, and there were at least a
couple of persons that wanted to accomplish a similar goal (i.e. run a
shell command but if nothing happened, no email should be sent).  The
only answer that addressed this specific problem was pointing to use
the 'preview' option with 'shellcommands':

http://www.cfengine.org/confdir/preview.html


Well, somewhere else (I guess an email sent to the mailing list), I
saw that somebody was using the "inform=false" in their config files,
like this:


shellcommands:
   MasterfilesServers::
      "/usr/bin/cvs -q update"  chdir=/var/masterconf   inform=false


I decided to try it and it worked exactly as I wanted, so I think this
is a useful feature and the fact that it is not listed in cfengine's
reference document is a bug.

- -- 
Hugo Gayosso



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