porting isconf to cfengine

I'm planning on implementing some stuff in cfenine in the near future --
mostly just basic if/thens like "if syslog-ng is installed then make sure
the daemon is running" -- and I realized that really, the types file in
isconf can be seen as a list of classes and associated stanzas, and the
hosts file is just specifies which classes are enabled for a given host.

So, I realized I can pretty easily take almost all of the information in
the hosts file and put it into cfengine instead.  This doesn't detract
from the functionality of isconf at all; in fact it make it a bit more
functional, because we've got a much more functiional umbrella over
isconf, and it suddenly becomes much easier to maintain state (things like
making sure daemons are running, stuff like that).

The only thing I haven't fully decided how to transfer from the hosts file
to a cfengine config is variables.  I'm not setting very many variables in
isconf, and in fact all of the ones I'm currently setting are used as
stanza names which are basically equivalent to classing (e.g., things like
"IP=1.1.1.1", which gets used in a stanza: "ifconfig/lan0--$IP"), so this
may not be a barrier, but I'd still like that ability.

Once I get cfengine installed everywhere, I also plan on replacing a
couple of ISconf's current functions with cfengine modules.  For instance,
the fileset module could easily use cfengine instead of rsync, and the
modechk script is similarly obsoleted.

Would anyone be interested in this?  I'm likely to do it either way, but
if others were interested I would probably get it done faster.  I'm eager
to do something, because I feel like my current environment doesn't give
me enough flexibility in responding to problems I see.

Luke

-- 
Secondly, Latin is a so-called "dead language."  It takes a lot to
kill a language.  There are countries the size of my kitchen that have
their own healthy languages.  Clearly, if Latin was useful in its
normal form, it would be alive today.  Therefore the language must be
defective.  I don't see much risk in changing it.  What's the worst
thing that could happen -- Latin will become unpopular?
                -- from the DNRC Newsletter, by Scott Adams


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