> 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
