Re: declarative (config file) way idea of handling the OS by way of the old system
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.
>
> ... what do you mean?
>
> It's the same package manager on all N system, you only need
> to do it once.
That's just knowing what packages you want to install. If that's
all you want, you can use dpkg --set-selections and a text list.
> Also, there is no need to encode the configuration in any
> advanced "language", it can be basic configuration like for
> xpdf or mpv or whatever.
>
> OTOH if you want a real programming language and environment
> for configuration and extension (e.g., Elisp for Emacs, Lua
> for mpv etc) that's doable as well, no doubt.
chef, puppet, ansible and so forth are languages for doing that.
-dsr-
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