Use Ansible or Puppet for package management

[sinewalker]

There's an old ansible ubuntu role from Cowboy that I didn't look at much because, well ubuntu, and also it does things that may be useful in vagrant or something, but not generally for me.

but.

I think it would be nice to move away from Cowboy's bash-scripts to install brew recipies and instead use something like brew bundles.

I could use this as a launch pad into doing similar tasks for the other target systems that I have #8, #9, #10, and possibly #12

[sinewalker]

De-scoping from the SUSE Milestone

• this actually is something that I'm keen to pursue, but it deserves to be its own project
• it may require a separate repo for the playbooks?
• Eventually I'd like to refactor dotfiles to do most the copy/init steps using Ansible rather than Cowboy's machinery. And do it for all hosts via Ansible Roles

Some interesting reading that I did today which has prompted this decision:

• "Bootstrap My Work Environment"
  • Part 1 Overview/motivation
  • Part 2 Chromebook
  • Part 3 Roles
  • Part 4 Cloud provisioning/Learning
  • Part 5 Conclusions
• Ansible Playbook Best Practices Guide

Also interesting (I think I've read this before? Might be what prompted me to start playing with this Dotfiles project) Using Git to Manage your User Configuration on Linux

[sinewalker]

Having de-scoped this from the SUSE milestone, I've ended up thinking this night about Ansible vs the Dotfiles Copy/Init/Link steps and wondering what actually do I want to achieve here?

I think that I want to refactor Dotfiles to be driven by Ansible.

The reasons that I have are still nascent, but here's my thinking tonight:

• Ansible solves the same problems. But it does them in a nicer, cleaner, better tested way than the Dotfiles machinery
• Ansible supports all my target OSes (note:- it does not try to make them homogeneous, there are different Tasks for doing the same thing in different OSes with different package managers, for instance)
• The way that Dotfiles is currently (planned to be) organised is by OS, but actually I need to do different Init steps based upon the role a specific machine is performing. The how-to is really only detail dependent on the OS, but that shouldn't dictate the what-to. This is how Ansible appears to work.

So I think that this Issue really ought to be addressed as a Project in its own right.

I should proceed with the other Issues where it makes sense, and Dotfiles still seems to be the right place to Provision my systems, it's just the way it works that will change. And for now I'll just Init for SUSE/Raspbian as OSes with catch-all packaging, rather than try to break that out. I'll save that for version 2.0 which will be Ansible-driven.

[sinewalker]

I'm currently learning Puppet for work. So another option here is to use Puppet for this.

https://blog.tfnico.com/2016/03/replacing-boxen-with-vanilla-puppet-for.html

This is interesting: https://github.com/tfnico/prefs/blob/master/puppet-mac.pp