a note or two about configuration management r6

[Jonathan P Tomer <phouchg@cif.rochester.edu>]

i've just read wichert's most excellent proposal for a configuration
management system. i like it a lot, and it fits with the things i'd been
thinking of (mainly the qualities of excessive modularity and generality,
which are essential for anything and especially config databases). i had a
few comments to make about it though.

1. in the metadata layer, it is important to note that we need a special
type for "list", which seems that it might need special support. for
example:

Template: printers
Type: list (printer)
Description: a bunch of printers
  Specifies all the printers on your network.


2. The most basic possible front-end is not one that uses stdin/out. It uses
sockets. That's a little more general, and can be more easily run remotely
(i'm thinking along the lines of a configuration server for the machine, so
i can do telnet foobar debconfig and get to the configuration server for the
machine. could be useful if you want to store common information on
individual machines, and skip the option of a central remote server (who
knows why)).

3. there is no 3.

--phouchg
"Reasoning is partly insane" --Rush, "Anagram (for Mongo)"
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