The recent round of LCFG client testing using real LCFG profiles from both Informatics and the wider community has shown that the code is now in very good shape and we’re close to being able to deploy to a larger group of machines. One issue that this testing has uncovered is related to how the type of a resource is specified in a schema. A type in the LCFG world really just controls what regular expression is used to validate the resource value. Various type annotations can be used (e.g. %integer, %boolean or %string) to limit the permitted values, if there is no annotation it is assumed to be a tag list and this has clearly caught out a few component authors. For example:
@foo %integer foo @bar %boolean bar @baz baz @quux sub1_$ sub2_$ quux sub1_$ sub2_$
Both of the last two examples (baz and quux) are tag lists, the first just does not have any associated sub-resources.
The compiler should not allow anything but valid tag names (which match /^[a-zA-Z0-9_]+$/) in a tag list resource but due to some inadequacies it currently permits pretty much anything. The new core code is a lot stricter and thus the v4 client will refuse to accept a profile if it contains invalid tag lists. Bugs have been filed against a few components (bug#1016 and bug#1017). It’s very satisfying to see the new code helping us improve the quality of our configurations.