[et-mgmt-tools] Cobbler and kickstart templating...

[Michael DeHaan]

Michael DeHaan wrote:
> Friends, Romans, Cobbler users,
>
> Seeing I personally have a few uses for a better templating system 
> than what I have now, I'm moving Cobbler back to using Cheetah for 
> kickstart templating in 0.4.0.  Originally the move away from Cheetah 
> was done to accomdate RHEL3 based cobbler servers, but I can't 
> continue to justify not having a good templating engine, so I'm 
> cutting those lose.
>
> Kickstart files you have now will be unaffected (and will still work 
> as is), though now "TEMPLATE::foo" just becomes an alias for the much 
> simpler $foo.   Variables that aren't found in --ksmeta arguments (say 
> $thisisnotavariable) just don't get expanded.
>
> I'll probably bundle Cheetah in the cobbler RPM (as I did before) to 
> make RHEL4 happy (good for Centos for having python-cheetah in the 
> repository).
> This will be in the 0.4.0 release and is already pushed out to the 
> public hg repo if you want to get a jump start on testing it out.
> You can learn to use the full power of Cheetah for your kickstart 
> templates here:   http://www.cheetahtemplate.org/learn.html
>
> --Michael
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> et-mgmt-tools mailing list
> et-mgmt-tools at redhat.com
> https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/et-mgmt-tools

I lied somewhat :)

Cobbler 0.4.0 will apparently require escaping of certain dollar signs 
in kickstart files.   Particularly, the list hard drives macro in 
/etc/cobbler/kickstart-fc6.ks for instance, will be changed so it will 
work for new users.   Those users already using those files will need to 
make those changes manually or to copy 
/etc/cobbler/kickstart-fc6.ks.rpmnew over the other file -- the RPM is 
set up not to overwrite files that users might have modified.

Per the Cheetah manual:

Placeholders and directives can be escaped by putting a backslash before 
them. |\$var| and |\#if| will be output as literal text.