How to assert existence/ownership/permissions of directory while ignoring contents?

[catniptwinz]

I'm experimenting with aconfmgr in the hopes of using it to manage some existing systems and I'd like to get some clarification regarding some behavior I'm observing from aconfmgr save.

I would like to assert that a directory should exist with specific ownership and permissions, but aconfmgr should not manage its contents. The eventual use case is a maildir used by system services.

Here is a minimal working example which reproduces the issue I'm encountering.

# mkdir -p /foo/bar/baz
# echo 'qux' > /foo/bar/baz/qux
# chmod -R 700 /foo/bar
# chown -R foo:foo /foo

aconfmgr save creates the assertions I'd expect to see:

CopyFile /foo/bar/baz/qux 700 foo foo
SetFileProperty /foo/bar/baz group foo
SetFileProperty /foo/bar/baz mode 700
SetFileProperty /foo/bar/baz owner foo
SetFileProperty /foo/bar group foo
SetFileProperty /foo/bar mode 700
SetFileProperty /foo/bar owner foo
SetFileProperty /foo group foo
SetFileProperty /foo owner foo

Now, we want to ignore the contents of /foo/bar. Add:

IgnorePath '/foo/bar/*'
CreateDir /foo/bar 700 foo foo

And aconfmgr save emits:

RemoveFile /foo/bar
RemoveFile /foo
SetFileProperty /foo/bar group ''
SetFileProperty /foo/bar mode ''
SetFileProperty /foo/bar owner ''

Why is this, and what is the correct way to assert the existence/ownership/permissions of a directory while ignoring its contents?

[CyberShadow]

I think IgnorePath '/foo/bar/?*' should work for ignoring a directory's contents but not the directory itself. Does that work?

[catniptwinz]

Unfortunately, no. The results are the same as with IgnorePath '/foo/bar/*'.

[CyberShadow]

Ah, this behavior is described here:

aconfmgr/src/common.bash

Lines 380 to 390 in e7f85b5

	# For convenience, we want to also ignore
	# directories which contain only ignored files.
	#
	# This is so that a rule such as:
	#
	# IgnorePath '/foo/bar/baz/*.log'
	#
	# does not cause `aconfmgr save` to still emit lines like
	#
	# CreateDir /foo/bar
	# CreateDir /foo/bar/baz

Needs some thought on how to proceed...

[catniptwinz]

Okay, I see. Indeed creating a non-ignored file inside the directory as a workaround seems to do what I need for the moment.

Intuitively I'd have hoped that the explicit CreateDir would have been sufficient to express "yes, we really want this directory even though it's empty", but I can see that the implementation wouldn't necessarily be straightforward.