Deprecated since version 1.2.0.
Warning
The Base plugin no longer receives new features/functionality. Please use Bundler instead.
The Base plugin is a structure plugin that provides the ability to add lists of unrelated entries into client configuration entry inventories.
Base works much like Bundler in its file format. The main difference between Base and Bundler is that Base files are included in all clients’ configuration whereas bundles must be included explicitly in your Metadata. See the Bundler page for details.
If you have lots of unconnected items (for instance: software packages whose configuration wasn’t modified, and that are also not depended on by other packages; or single directories or files not belonging to a package), using Bundles in Metadata would clutter or enlarge your Metadata/groups.xml file, because they all would need to be explicitly specified. Base/ on the other hand is the perfect place to put these items.
Without using Base, you would be forced to put them directly into your group definitions in groups.xml, either as many small bundles (substantially enlarging it) or into something like Bundler/unrelated-entries.xml. Using the latter is especially bad if you mix packages and services in your Bundle, since for any updated package in that bundle, the now-related services would be restarted.
The Base entries can still be assigned based on group membership, but when they aren’t part of a group, each and every client gets the entry. So Base is also a great place to put entries that a large number of your clients will get.
For example, you could have a file Base/packages.xml
<Base>
<Package name='acpid'/>
<Package name='auditd'/>
[...]
<Group name='openSUSE11.2'>
<Package name='syslog-ng'/>
</Group>
<Group name='openSUSE11.3'>
<Package name='rsyslog'/>
</Group>
[...]
<Package name='zlib'/>
</Base>
Note
You don’t have to reference to the files in Base from anywhere. As long as you include Base in your plugins = ... line in bcfg2.conf, these are included automatically.
Note
Your Base files have to match the pattern Base/*.xml to be included.
The decision when to use Base and when to use Bundler depends on the configuration entry in question, and what you are trying to achieve.
Base is mainly used for cases where you don’t want/need to explicitly include particular configuration items. Let’s say all your machines are various linux distributions. In this case, you may want to manage the /etc/hosts file using Base instead of Bundler since you will not have to include any Bundles in your Metadata. However, you could alternatively have a base ‘linux’ group that all the clients inherit which includes a linux Bundle with the /etc/hosts configuration entry.