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I might just give this a try.

I postponed using Puppet/Chef because it didn't seem right that they were Ruby and thus had their own dependency chain.

Seems to me automatic configuration should be as close to whatever is available on a bare install, meaning C/bash.

At least for (recent versions of) Ubuntu Server, a C compiler isn't available on a bare install, so it'd need to just be Bash.

And what's with the aversion to dependencies? Installing Ruby is just an apt-get invocation away from a bare server.