"flow"/"recipe" as a basic ARK thing?

Folks, just an idle musing that (I hope) is not a million
miles from stuff Jonathan was writing about last week (hairy
XML/Schemas/XSLT/... fun).

When you buy into doing package stuff in the Sidai Way, the
thing you're really buying is a particular "flow": beginning
with <get-source>, on through <configure> and <compile>, to
<install> and then finally to <deploy> and <reveal>.  All
packages then go through that "flow", even if some of the
methods are made to be no-ops.

The GNU package flow is a specialization of the Sidai flow:
basically, it has a <configure> step that does something.

You might have "flows" for "add a new user", "rotate all log
files at a site", and so on.

Can we say more powerful/stronger things about a "flow" than
we might about a single method?  Can a flow be a more
bolted-down thing, so that the person re-using it is more
confident of its behavior (e.g. a "flow" might specify all
possible <param>s, so that a specializer couldn't add any
weird and wacky code to it)?  Are flows kinda orthogonal,
say something like "aspects" are to object-oriented
programming?

I'm wondering if we have a candidate for a better
first-class abstraction...

(I'm mumbling now; I will be mostly off the air for a couple
of weeks.)

Will


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