Unclear VALIDATOR behavior for a cached find_XXX() result

Development
1

When a find_XXX() command is successful, it stores its result in a cache variable. On subsequent runs, what should happen if a VALIDATOR is specified? Should the validator be ignored, or should the command re-validate the cached result? And if it re-validates and it fails validation (the validator may have changed or been added since the cached result), should it discard the cached result and search again, or just replace the cached result with <VAR>-NOTFOUND?

It’s not clear to me from the documentation what we think should happen. And I’m not even sure what I’d intuitively expect in this situation either.

CC: @marc.chevrier @brad.king

2

The VALIDATOR argument is just an added constraint to the other ones (NAMES, etc…), so the behavior of find_xxx commands is not changed. When a cache variable exists and contains a valid value, no search at all is done so the VALIDATOR argument is ignored in the way as all other arguments.

3

Thanks. I included a couple of sentences to make that explicit in MR 7874 which improves the wording of the VALIDATOR docs more generally.