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by awj 2133 days ago
> The Ansible vault is a bad example of this. They have a little command `ansible-vault` that lets you manage encrypted files and strings. If you run `ansible-vault edit ./nonexistent_file` it tells you that you meant `ansible-vault create` and vice versa but doesn't just do it despite the user intent being clear. This ultimately lead me to just patching it to do the right thing.

IMO it's a bit much to decide what "the right thing" is there. Blindly assuming that someone attempting to edit credentials didn't mistype a file name isn't exactly safe and sounds like a great way to cause problems based on believing you updated something you did not in fact update.

1 comments

That was my first thought as well. This is going to lead to people typo'ing, opening a blank file, being confused that their credentials are gone, and then adding in the updated credentials in the wrong place.