Re: Meta-things

> And I remember (but don't see at the moment) a message about cfengine - I'm
> interested in seeing how well this works out.  ...

I also lean to the view that cfengine isn't "general" in the
right kind of way.  (Mumble mumble... Waffle waffle...)

But I figure it's Very Good at a set of tasks, e.g. "link
this file to that", "copy this to there", "the permissions
for foo should be ..." and so on.

My idea, at least for Arusha "packages": let everything up
to "build" be done as now.  This typically involves a few
hosts (one per platform type), and is done once-for-all.

Then, for the "deploy" and "reveal" steps, which are *per
host* (and any other methods that are *per host*), generate
a cfengine script (even a horrible one) that expresses how
you want the deployment/revealing done.

cfengine will (a) do the deploy/reveal *much* faster; (b)
you can re-run it, to get "convergent" behavior, which
everyone loves, and (c) because cfengine is handling all of
the per-host behavior, ARK would then scale precisely as
much as cfengine does ("thousands of hosts?").

This is all in the realm of "idle experiment", so really
don't count on it.  (Or, um, let's talk...?)

Will