Re: [Fab-user] idempotency contrib

[Ronan Amicel]

On Thu, Oct 20, 2011 at 16:47, Robert Terhaar
<address@hidden> wrote:
>
> If you're going to reinvent chef/puppet, in python/fabric I suggest that you 
> examine their naming conventions. Both 'ensure' and 'require' are parameter 
> names in Chef and Puppet, and things might get a bit confusing for people who 
> are new to Fabric.
>
>
> In puppet they're called 'resources'.
>
> e.g., Package is a Resource type: 
> http://docs.puppetlabs.com/references/2.7.3/type.html#package
>
> Apt is a Package Provider, (or yum, etc since chef/puppet is declarative, you 
> don't have to specify how to install your package, just what you want to 
> install)
> and then 'apache2' is sort of like a resource object instance.

 Robert, thanks for your feedback!

Just for the record, the goal is not to write a full-fledge
configuration management tool like Chef or Puppet.

I've never used Puppet, but I'm familiar with Chef. I have used it on
several projects, and generally like it. However, I feel it is
sometimes overkill when you only need a simple setup, and I have found
the learning curve is quite steep. It has taken me significant time
and effort to understand it and get it working for me. Other
developers around me have had similar experiences.

With fabtools, the goal is more to provide a toolbox on top of fabric,
to help developers easily solve some common use cases, like
configuring an Ubuntu box to deploy a web app, using a terse,
single-file, pythonic, declarative specification.

The concepts in Chef and Puppet are obviously sources of inspiration,
and consistency with their terminology is desirable where it makes
sense. I'm not sure it will be a priority though, as I think that the
target user is unlikely to be already familiar with those tools
(that's the way I see it, but I may be wrong).

-- 
Ronan Amicel
http://topixtream.com/