Martin Vidner, SUSE
Version 1, January 2013
A Do-not-edit Notice can be found in the first dozen lines of a textual
configuration file. The notice starts on the line containing the string
DO NOT EDIT (without quotes) and ends with an empty line.
This notice will be simply displayed as a warning by a tool that helps the user edit the file. Obviously, one such tool is a text editor. The delimiters are present to assist other tools (for example YaST) which present the file in a more structured way.
In most formats of configuration files, the notice will need to be enclosed in a comment block. Stripping the comment delimiters is not addressed in this version of the specification.
Example, /etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-eth0
# DO NOT EDIT this file, it will be overwritten by Chef every 30 minutes.
# Instead, edit: git://git.example.com/intranet/ifcfg-eth0.template
STARTMODE=auto
BOOTPROTO=dhcp
Example dialog presented by YaST:
+--- Warning -------------------------------------------------------------+
| |
| This module, Network Configuration, may need to modify the file |
| '/etc/sysconfig/network/ifcfg-eth0' which contains this notice: |
| |
| DO NOT EDIT this file, it will be overwritten by Chef every 30 minutes. |
| Instead, edit: git://git.example.com/intranet/ifcfg-eth0.template |
| |
| [Continue] [Cancel] |
+-------------------------------------------------------------------------+