Re: declarative (config file) way idea of handling the OS by way of the old system

[Dan Ritter <dsr@randomstring.org>]

Emanuel Berg wrote: 
> Dan Ritter wrote:
> 
> > You can do it with puppet, chef, ansible, salt... 
> >
> > You can go further into it with guix and nix.
> >
> > It can be quite a lot of work
> 
> Okay, but why so, since it looks like the task to be done is
> just a config file that's iterated by a script and boiled down
> to suitable commands that are well-known, not the least
> because we are used to do them manually?

For the very obvious reason that there is one major additional
task to go from "I have configured this machine the way I want
it" to "This machine's configuration is now encoded in a
language I needed to learn for the purpose" -- and a second task
to go to "and it can be generalized to run on multiple
machines".

So if you're doing it for one machine, you effectively have to
do it twice; if you're doing it for N machines, you have to do
it about 2 and a half times. If N is much larger than 3, you
win.

-dsr-