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Comment by jacques_chester | Hacker News Reader

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jacques_chester

There's a whole bunch of tools groping awkardly in a single direction here:

1. Give a graph to the computer

2. The computer makes the graph a reality

http://chester.id.au/2012/06/27/a-not-sobrief-aside-on-reign...

Puppet, Chef, Cfengine come at it from an on-disk direction.

Upstart, SMF, systemd, launchd come at it from a runtime direction.

They're still talking past each other. And it's annoying.

What I would really like is a system that does both as first-class citizens. I may be waiting a while.

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  There's a whole bunch of tools groping awkardly in a single direction here:
    1. Give a graph to the computer
    2. The computer makes the graph a reality

The good ol' fashioned make tool does exactly this and, in the spirit of Unix, pretty much nothing else.

The problem is in determining whether the dependencies of a node in the graph are satisfied. Make does this by comparing file times. All the other 'graph resolving systems' you mentioned do something different. Obviously the solution is to abstract the dependency test from the graph itself. Then all these systems become pretty much the same.

> The good ol' fashioned make tool does exactly this and, in the spirit of Unix, pretty much nothing else.

Make still requires a manual step. I'm thinking of systems that do this themselves. Active control systems, constantly comparing the state of the world to the reference graph.

I don't want the unix tradition. The unix tradition is a pain in the rear end to actually administer. I want a single management framework with a single DSL that does it all.

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