Automatic desktop configuration using Ansible and Perl
Science, Not Fiction
The superluminal speed of the provisioning tool Ansible is suitable for configuration and release management of medium-sized server farms, as well as for use at home for restoring adjustments on your Linux desktop.
About every five years it is time to install a new Linux distribution in the Perlmeister labs. Only every five years because, in my experience, after running do-release-upgrade, getting all the small cronjobs that inevitably require special treatment – because of new versions of Perl, Apache, and various libraries – up and running again involves a huge amount of effort.
Many open source developers – both in the distribution scene (Hello, Ubuntu!) and in the tool area (Hello, OpenSSL! – don't give two hoots about backward compatibility and expect me to take a few days vacation each time, sitting and cussing in front of my Linux desktop while changing configurations or customizing scripts.
I then often only vaguely remember all the little manually inserted patches that were needed to finally get one tool or another running to my satisfaction. Even weeks after completing the upgrade, it is not unusual to find something that still isn't working properly; and each time, I rack my brains, trying to remember how I solved it years ago.
[...]
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