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Debian should provide high quality ansible roles (and/or salt formulas, etc.)

The problem

In the modern world, we don't configure services with debconf but with tools like ansible, puppet, salt, etc. All those tools have some sort of external repositories where users can share the automation that they created but most of them share some common issues:

  • there's few review and the quality is thus varying
  • you often have multiple implementations to configure the same service
  • you have no guaranty of maintenance over time
  • the lack of standardization hurts when you try to combine multiple of those automations
  • they might not have been tested on Debian

Expected situation

Debian is very good at creating high-quality policies and applying them consistently, and then maintaining the result over time.

Thus Debian should include in its goals to provide high quality ansible roles (and/or salt formulas, etc.) that can be used to configure the services that you would install with packages from the Debian OS. This would require defining an "Ansible policy" to dictate how those roles should work (how variables are named, how you feed data, etc.).

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