Re: Prepackaged configurations

[seth vidal <skvidal phy duke edu>]

> We do many of the same things with CFengine. The one thing I have found 
> is that the syntax of CFengine really needs a good washing. It is 
> somewhat inconsistant as the authors have added features and not fixed 
> the parser any. 

Something we started working on at duke but kinda got sidetracked as
other work tookover was an xml format for describing some of things w/i
a machine configuration and running certain processes.

The goal was then you could easily design an interface to take those xml
descriptions and manufacture a configuration.

xml is nice for making a configuration files that programs can
consistently edit and re-read.

There is also a short format for something I'd like to include in the
next version of yum - it's just a way to build queues of processes to
run as a single transaction.
ex:
 install foo
 remove bar
 update baz
 groupinstall foogroup

so it can compile all of those into one transaction and run them.

David Christian worked on the format and commands and I want to make it
(and a bunch of other things) in there.

so a thought to a format that easily configured and managed by a program
and also human editable is a good idea.

no need to create a new file format like cfengine did.

-sv