Hi! It makes sense, and is in fact suggested on this site, to have a critical file change trigger a service restart with puppet meta-parameters (such as notify or subscribe). For example:

  ## file definition for printers.conf
  file { "/etc/cups/printers.conf":
    [snip],
    source => "puppet:///module/etc/cups/printers.conf"
  }

  ## service definition for sshd
  service { 'cups':
    ensure => running,
    subscribe => File['/etc/cups/printers.conf']
  }

But in the case of CUPS, this triggers and endless loop of restarts; the logic works like this:

1. Change puppetmaster's version of /etc/cups/printers.conf
2. puppetmaster pushes new version to client, triggering cups restart
3. cupsd restart insists on putting its own time stamp at the top of printers.conf, 'Written by cupsd...'
4. This change will be seen as out of date, so after runinterval, we return to (1).

Is there a way to suppress cupsd's need to time stamp the file? Or is there a puppet trick that could help here?

Thanks!