On 3/22/2013 7:30 AM, Harry Hoffman wrote:
Have you run "cobbler validateks" on the kickstart file that includes
the snippet?

Thanks, I didn't know about this -- However, for my particular example of a broken snippet, it doesn't help.  It just stops working with a non-helpful error message when it gets to the kickstart with the problem:

Exception occured: <type 'exceptions.NameError'>
[etc]

Also, there's the ErrorCatcher class in cheetah (albeit not built into
cobbler) that can help with this.

Thanks again!   This will probably help for some things.  Still, it doesn't appear to help with my example broken snippet.  At least, not when I did this:
    #errorCatcher Echo
    #if $break_me == 1
    #  no #end if...

I did notice that if  you have an undefined variable, it changes the behavior completely.  Without errorCatcher, the kickstart would just have:
    $SNIPPET('snippet_with_error')
but with errorCatcher, the kickstart is printed with the undefined variable in it.  Maybe this isn't a good thing, because there's no error message anywhere I can find.  i.e. all the errorCatcher does in this case is make the error silent!  At least when "$SNIPPET" is present I know there's an error in it :)

-- 
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Robert Jacobson               Robert.C.Jacobson@nasa.gov
Lead System Admin       Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO)
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