> language to do it. Here are some of those ways:
> Saltstack, Puppet, chef, ansible, AWS Cloudformation, XML....
I hear you, and you're probably right (save for XML: not sure what it
has to with the subject).
Simply that it could be accomplished with XML at base, with no other larger
framework being used. If it looks like the right way to go.
This same thought crossed my mind while I was writing my
previous message.
All great minds think alike. I think some ancient Greek with a great mind said that :-)
Maybe what I want is simply for these to be better integrated
into Debian's package management, or just be more often used by "single
user admins" so there's lots of documentation and experience to help
get started.
That's pretty much what I thought. We don't need to remove the older mechanisms,
we build on top of them. So no reason the old one can't be kept current.
Example: Saltstack is really big in terms of lines-of-code. Could the right parts of it
be shoe-horned into a running installer? Or it's libraries used so we can "script" even
a local installation? It's possible to configure using saltstack itself on the server it runs on.
Read that twice :-)
So why not use it as an install tool? Then your entire configuration is recorded in and
driven by a pretty simple text file. That's all you need, so we can pre-seed that config file
for automatic installs. And we can customise that SAME file for installs configured in real-time,
because salt has excellent templating capability in the config files.
Stefan