[et-mgmt-tools] [ANNOUNCE] Func 0.0.12

[Michael DeHaan]

>>     * Have you ever tried to manage a large number of systems with SSH?
>>       Have you wanted a better way?
>>     
>
> Anybody who manages their machines that way (and thinks they are truly
> managing them) needs to go back to sysadmin school.

As I'm running a bit late and need to get going, I'll leave that for 
someone else to respond to in detail -- but there are a lot of extremely 
intelligent sysadmins running thousands of machine configurations out 
there, many of which who are on these lists.   A couple of them have 
been working with us to build this.   They've mentioned they've wanted 
better tools around key exchange, and ways to perform one-offs and for 
data gathering -- things that don't fit well into the cfengine/puppet 
kind of models.   Lots of us who decided to build this think similar 
things, and at least four of us have said "I thought about building this 
at one time or another and never did".  So yeah, we think it has uses.  
Configuration Management tools are great at declaring the way a system 
should look, and are a great hammer, but sometimes you need an allen 
wrench.   You can use both.   They are not competing.

Anyhow, this is part of the reason we're not putting func explicitly on 
a systems management email list ... Func has uses other than systems 
management, for other apps that want a generic key exchange mechanism 
and modular XMLRPC framework.  That's what we're building.   We expect 
all sorts of Fedora apps to start using the infrastructure, because it's 
small, simple, and nice and Pythonic.  

Does it have systems management uses?   Certaintly.   Is it a Puppet 
replacement?  No.

--Michael