ARK/Arusha Core Competence

Hi Folks,

After lurking for a while and more recently spending some skull sweat
putting together a couple of proposals for this year's LISA, I have a
basic question about where you all see Arusha going; how you would
characterize its scope or coverage...  Which of the following problem
domains do you see Arusha addressing more directly?  

	- third-party package builds and deployment,
	  like LUDE
	  http://www.iro.umontreal.ca/contrib/lude/lude2_toc.html
	  or depot
	  http://andrew2.andrew.cmu.edu/depot/depot.html

	- operating system configuration, like cfengine
	  http://www.iu.hioslo.no/cfengine/ 

	- operating system completion and maintenance, like RedHat
	  RPM/rpmfind/up2date/autorpm, or Debian apt/apt-get/dpkg, or
	  Solaris pkgadd etc, or pick-your-vendorware. 

	- bare-disk, initial formatting and installation of an
	  operating system, like jumpstart, kickstart, or vendor
	  initial install media.  


I've tried to arrange these in higher-to-lower-level order.  Granted
there is a lot of overlap between these, and it could be broken down
into different categories, and RPM etc. are used for both OS and
third-party packages, generic tools like cfengine are capable of doing
the first three if stretched a little, and so on.  

I have a guess as to where in this spectrum Arusha lives, but what are
your opinions about where its core competence lies?  

Steve
-- 
                        .       .    `   *    
Steve Traugott   ` .  *  +                       
Enterprise Systems Architect            + `     
[email protected]    '   *  .   '  +`   *