On Mon, Apr 22, 2013 at 3:35 PM, Bill Bogstad <bogs...@pobox.com> wrote:
> > I've been waiting for at least a decade now for a Linux distribution to > pick one of the CMs out there and just > start supporting using said CM as the default way to manage their > distribution. It seems like the commercial distributions > (RHEL, SuSe, ??) all want to build their own GUI based management system > from scratch. I'm guessing this is part of their > attempt at "value-add" in order to convince people to buy even bigger > support contracts. For me it just means, they are no better then the free > distributions (Debian, Fedora, Ubuntu) in terms of real world support. > I've rarely had to contact > vendor support for software, but I've had to install/reinstall systems > countless times where a by default CM would have been a big advantage. > > Bill Bogstad > > This won't happen for a long time for exactly the reason the Puppet et al is so complicated: Staunch resistance to using any type of standard configuration file. Because of this, every CM tool must come up with a way to manage all thousands of different config files, creating a generator for every one out there. Anyone who's used templates quickly realizes that they are simply not sufficient for all cases. The *nix method of using a different freeform text file for every program is just not scalable. Say what you will about them, but Microsoft realized this was a problem with INI files a long time ago and migrated to the registry. You may scoff, and one could say that early *implementations* of the registry left something to be desired, but the *idea* of having a centrally managed config store with a standard API used by all programs is what allows them to completely dominate in the Enterprise market (and is what Puppet tries to achieve now). A lot of the complex things you do with Puppet are complete child's play with Group Policy. ❧ Brian Mathis
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