[Savannah-register-public] [task #6268] Submission of Configutils

[Michael Clarke]

URL:
  <http://savannah.nongnu.org/task/?6268>

                 Summary: Submission of Configutils
                 Project: Savannah Administration
            Submitted by: clarkema
            Submitted on: Wednesday 12/20/2006 at 01:17
         Should Start On: Wednesday 12/20/2006 at 00:00
   Should be Finished on: Saturday 12/30/2006 at 00:00
                Category: Project Approval
                Priority: 5 - Normal
                  Status: None
                 Privacy: Public
        Percent Complete: 0%
             Assigned to: None
             Open/Closed: Open
         Discussion Lock: Any
                  Effort: 0.00

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Details:

A new project has been registered at Savannah 
This project account will remain inactive until a site admin approves or
discards the registration.


= Registration Administration =

While this item will be useful to track the registration process, *approving
or discarding the registration must be done using the specific Group
Administration
<https://savannah.nongnu.org/siteadmin/groupedit.php?group_id=8990> page*,
accessible only to site administrators, effectively *logged as site
administrators* (superuser):

* Group Administration
<https://savannah.nongnu.org/siteadmin/groupedit.php?group_id=8990>


= Registration Details =

* Name: *Configutils*
* System Name:  *configutils*
* Type: non-GNU software & documentation
* License: GNU General Public License V2 or later

----

==== Description: ====
configutils
===========

configutils is a state-based configuration-management system based upon
the principles presented in
http://www.sane.nl/sane2006/program/final-papers/R8.pdf, by Ray Miller.

It started out as a fork of that software, but has since grown
substantially, with various features added (detailed in debian/changelog),
especially to enhance security in untrusted environments.  

Centralised configuration management allows for easier configuration and
greater consistency and better auditing than managing server
configurations by hand on the running server.  It is also an important
step towards _reproducible_ systems -- many servers contain little or no
unique data (DNS servers, compute nodes, etc.), and an appropriate
management system would make it trivial to bring up a new instance of
such a server.

configutils is written in Perl, and packaged using GNU Autotools.  The
core is licensed under the GPL; however, some Perl modules which do not
logically belong to the core are, or may be, licensed under the same
terms as Perl itself, to ease distribution via CPAN.

Currently the primary testing and development platform is Debian
GNU/Linux, although the aim is to make the package as portable as
possible including Solaris and (eventually) Windows.  This raises a
question: the port to Windows will likely involve some shims written in
PowerShell
(http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/technologies/management/powershell/default.mspx).
While these will be GPL, the same as the majority of the rest of the
project, they will require the use of non-free software to run (since I
know of no Free alternative to PowerShell).  However, they add no
functionality to the package as a whole, and would be required only to
make it run on non-free platforms.  Would that fit the GNU guidelines?
Presumably any custom .NET code would need to run under the current
version of Mono as well as the MS implementation?

The code may be downloaded from
<http://www.lancs.ac.uk/~clarkema/configutils-pre.tar.bz2>.  Please note
that it's currently in a state of flux -- in particular, documentation
(a weak-point of the pre-fork code) and the Autotools scaffolding are in
very early stages, and there is no TeXinfo documentation yet.



==== Other Software Required: ====
Perl, and the following Perl libraries:
version
Digest::SHA1
Net::Netmask
Template
YAML
Log::Log4perl







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