Re: what to do w/ hosts

Joel S writes:

(sorry not to have replied earlier; partly busy, partly I
agree with too much of it :-)

> The benefit of describing hosts, packages, etc. in ARK XML
> instead of a generic knowledge modeling language comes
> from Arusha's added magic--the assumptions and interfaces
> that support system administration and configuration.

Yes, and a bit of ugly stuff that Mere Mortals can
understand is better than perfection that requires brains
the size of planets...

Specific questions:

> How hard is it to add another deployment type (say FTP or NFS)?

Pretty easy, I think.  For something like the FTP side,
having 'expect' as a supported language might be cool.
Nobody's come clamoring for it yet, though...

> How hard is it for user's to represent "host down" without
> internal support?

I'm not quite sure I understand the question; but I can tell
you what I do :-) For hosts that are not yet in the game
(e.g. I'm going to build them tomorrow), I mark their
<status> as 'pending'.  For hosts that are supposed to be up
and playing (<status>active</status>) but aren't, I put, in
my .ark_profile

down-hosts = badhostA,badhostB

(which saves putting the same info on the command line).

Will