Rudder

The problem happen when we have several values with a CFEngine variable in them, and that the pattern of the variables are alike. In that case, we match received report against these pattern at random, which may fail.

A concret example to understand:

- directive file edit on file:
1. /tmp/foo.${some_var}
2. /tmp/foo.backup.${some_other_var}

- receved reports:
a. /tmp/foo.txt
b. /tmp/foo.backup.txt

Now, if we match a. with 1. and b. with 2., everything is OK.
On the other hand, if we match b. with 1. , it will be OK BUT matching a. with 2. will obviously fail.

The real good solution is to add a unique identifier to each report to uniquely match one report value into an expected one. That can't be done without modification in CFEngine.

As a workaround, we could try to take into account the lenght of the prefix, starting with prefix of greater lenght. That won't help for pathological case like:
- directive edit file:
1. /tmp${sys.fstab} (where sys.fstab is typically "/etc/fstab")
2. /tmp/${sys.arch}/${sys.hostname}

But it will help in the first example. And I don't think that with that method, we are likelly to reject case that were accepted before.