Support wildcards or regular expressions with rset(1) 'hostname' argument

[marinbernard-mt]

Hi,

I use as a deployment and config management tool for several servers in a classical web stack (web, lb, db, etc.). I often have to run all or part of my labels on several hosts. Typing the name of every targeted host became tedious, so I created a Makefile with a bunch of targets to make it faster to use.

Using a Makefile for this is a bit overkill. Would it be possible to make rset(1) support basic wildcards (* and ?) or even regular expressions for host targeting ?

Thank you.

[eradman]

There is a need for this. I wonder if it would suffice to introduce a special keyword such as all.

[marinbernard-mt]

Fom my point of view, no. I often have to target a whole host class (e.g.: mariadb-* for mariadb-01, mariadb-02, mariadb-03, etc.). Wildcards would allow targeting these hosts easily.

[eradman]

I think that a pattern should only match the first entry for each host, not all aliases. For example, bhyve* would match only bhyve1, bhyve2:

bhyve1,bhyve1-em0: bhyve/
    users_freebsd.pln
    bhyve.pln

bhyve2,bhyve1-em0: bhyve/
    users_freebsd.pln
    bhyve.pln

(In this case *-em0 resolves to a management interface on each host.)

[marinbernard-mt]

It makes sense if all subsequent entries for a host are aliases for the same host. But if those entries are used to reference several distinct hosts sharing the same pln files (for instance a 3- or 5-node cluster), matching only the first host would be a problem.

I think both approaches are valid. Anyway, I think the documentation should be improved to demonstrate the canonical way to build inventory files.