Config stuff and glump (as my introduction)

[Konstantin Ryabitsev]

Hello, all:

I've been recently invited to join this list, seeing as I'm the
original author of Glump (currently maintained by Seth), and also
because I'm currently in a similar situation trying to figure out what
to use for system config management here at McGill (I was recently
made sysadmin again after being a PHP monkey for over a year).

Now, I've not touched glump since mid-2005, and it's changed a bit
since then. I do hate cfengine (probably party due to the way it's set
up here), and I do not consider puppet to be a good alternative,
mostly because it's "yet another config language" and because it's
written in ruby. To use puppet, I'd have to learn "yet another config
language" and ruby, which is prohibitively time-consuming.

I've not yet had time to investigate bcfg2, but I will in the near
future. However, I'm wondering if I could use and extend glump to do
all I need -- will probably be the simplest. :)

I'm currently wondering how much pain it would be to write a trac
plugin that would do the same thing glump currently does. That should
give me an infrastructure with an extensive access to SVN and db for
versioning purposes, and built-in documentation/ticketing system.
Since trac provides POST-handing, I could also do stuff like edit
config files on the system to the point where they are working, and
then "bless" them to be uploaded, committed to svn, and be immediately
available to all members of that system group (unless that file is
managed by a glump-like system).

Now, this is pure vapourware. :) The only reason I'm interested in
implementing this is because we already use trac extensively, and
because writing plugins for it is pretty simple. I will probably start
out with just writing a glump plugin that will use the svn repository
to hold glump configs and sources, and then go on from there.

If you guys are interested in glump, would you also be interested in a
"trac-ified" glump? I plan to start working on this as soon as next
week.

Cheers and happy new year,
-- 
Konstantin Ryabitsev
Montréal, Québec