The Strengths and Weakness of Fedora/RHEL OS management

[sean]

On Tue, 28 Mar 2006 17:51:14 -0800
David Lutterkort <dlutter at redhat.com> wrote:

> While I agree in theory, the reality of config files with different
> formats makes it extremely hard to get there. One approach that is being
> pushed by a number of players to achieve uniform management of configs
> is CIM/WBEM, an enormous standard that IMHO too much tool-specific
> knowledge to see wide adoption.
> 
> A lighter-weight approach seems more promising: encapsulate most of the
> config-file specific knowledge in simple script wrappers that can be
> controlled by a declarative description of the configuration you want to
> achieve and the logical interdependencies between them. This is what
> puppet does, and why I find it very attractive.

Okay, so your script wrappers do all the config-file specific work etc.  
We talked about making a tool earlier in this conversation that would 
know how to handle all the different config file formats, so i'm with 
you up to there.

But what is the advantage of building an entire new config language 
around these wrappers?  Couldn't they be manipulated just as easily 
with shell or python?    Can the administrator make simple ad-hoc 
command line config file changes?

Sean