a which work around is to call the gethosts method multiple times e.g.
for an AND operations

gethosts(...) & gethosts(...)

this basically returns an array, so you can use logical operators on them.

This is a usable workaround but it is pretty unpleasant.

The old iclassify scripts are simple one-liners:
QUERY="tag:appserver AND NOT tag:foo AND NOT tag:platform AND NOT..etc"

New ones look more like this: (use += for 'or')
hosts = gethosts( { "class" => "appserver" } )
hosts -= gethosts( {"class" => "platform" } )
hosts -= gethosts( {"class" => "foo" } )
...

Just fyi the 'and' case works works cleanly:
hosts=gethosts( { "class" => ["appserver","foo"] } )

(Extra detail in case anyone else stumbles across this bug report and needs a solution :) ..)

Dis Connect wrote:

This is a usable workaround but it is pretty unpleasant.

The old iclassify scripts are simple one-liners:
QUERY="tag:appserver AND NOT tag:foo AND NOT tag:platform AND NOT..etc"

I just said its a work around for now :)

Just fyi the 'and' case works works cleanly:

yes I know - I did remember spending some time on getting it to work ;)

• get all hosts 'foo'
• get all hosts 'bar' and subtract
• for all remaining hosts, query again by hostname, verbose.
• operate on the facts you want

This doesn't even pretend to scale..

• get all hosts 'foo' and not 'bar', verbose
• operate on the facts you want

[[http://www.davebalmain.com/api/classes/Ferret/QueryParser.html]] A query language that would add a ton of flexibility to foreman.