I'm quite new with cobbler but I really want to use it in production for my company.

We use to use/do a chef cookbook for any software we are using (and release it to community).

A cookbook already exists: http://community.opscode.com/cookbooks/cobbler

but quite old and unmaintained.

So I fork it to this repo; https://github.com/optiflows-cookbooks/cobbler

I do a lot of work... but I'm quite blocked by cobbler behavior.

As I see, your software is really part of fedora universe:

Makefile use "apache" user (instead of "www-data" on debian-like), for example

It also manage configuration with Makefile (and as said on doc, erase configuration if redo... bad things append... sometimes :) )

And software manage apache2 conf... I prefer couple nginx/uwsgi. HTTP server depend on habits etc, so why blocking to this one only?

And we can't install only a package (cobbled, web or koan) separately if we aren't use rpm.

All that to say that Chef is a really good tool to test and/or deploy software and can be part of cobbler project (why not a https://github.com/cobbler/cobbler-cookbook ?) and I'm ready to give you my work.

And also, this work can be a base to understand what can be done to ease deployment/packaging.

In my company, we are working on a software quite similar to cobbler (a python daemon with a django web interface), what we are testing now is to separate project in different repository and use python module dependency (mainly web depend on a "core" module produce on daemon repo).

And to do this we are only use as much as possible vanilla setup.py.

For configuration files, we are providing some file as documentation (configuration.conf.sample) and let user do what he want (this user can be a chef cookbook ;) ).

Are you interest by a work like that? Do you have any questions/remarks?

Python packaging is always a large question... so I'm will be happy to discuss / learn with someone.

Best regards/