Narayan Desai wrote:
This was the point of the paper Paul and Ed did last year. The way to
go is to agree on an intermediate format that several tools can
consume in an opaque fashion. The linkage into a given tool is tool
specific, but the constraint compiler, or whatever can just output a
single format.
The problem is that the semantics are completely different. Based on
the work that led to that paper, I made sure that Puppet uses a very
simple portable format for the configurations it sends to its clients,
and I could easily switch to XML. This format is basically a collection
of lists and hashes, and each hash maps directly to a resource that
you'd manage on the client, such as a service, user, package, host, or
mount point.
If anyone else were interested in consuming this format, they could use
Puppet's language to generate it; if anyone else were interested in
producing this format, they could easily generate it on their own; if
anyone else were interested in performing computation on the results of
the compile, before the configuration is sent to the client, it would be
trivial to add a hook for that (heck, I might do that this month just so
it's there).
No one's interested though. No one else that I've seen operates at the
same level of abstraction as Puppet, which means no other tool can match
semantics, which means that a reusable format is not likely to be used
by more than one tool.
There's been discussion of this exact same thing in the Open Management
Consortium[1], with the exact same results -- everyone agrees it's a
great idea, and no one actually integrates with anyone else's tool
because everyone already has what they need. The most we can hope for,
I fear, is that the next generation of tool developers will use these
reusable formats.
For what it is worth, I think that I finally have a good place to plug
this interface in. Does anyone have any higher-level tools they want
to experiment with?
Heh, me too, for what it's worth. Puppet can even cache the compiled
results in a database so you can do analysis all day long if you want.
1 - http://open-management.com/
--
The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don't.
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Luke Kanies | http://reductivelabs.com | http://madstop.com
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