[config-package-dev] Late CFP submission for config-package-dev

[Geoffrey Thomas]

Hi,

I hope you'll consider a late submission -- I only noticed this conference 
on Thursday night and I was travelling yesterday.

I'd like to talk about our experiences developing and deploying 
config-package-dev, a system for sitewide configuration based on Debian 
packaging. There are two main things that differentiate config-package-dev 
from other systems: first, it's intended to be usable for default 
configuration that the local sysadmin can customize, and second, 
configuration takes the form of Debian packages that integrate with the 
standard package manager.

We developed config-package-dev as part of Debathena, a repackaging of 
MIT's historic Athena environment for Debian/Ubuntu machines. One of the 
goals of the development effort was to make Athena resources easily usable 
on students' personal laptops running Debian or Ubuntu, as well as on the 
school-run workstations in computer labs. We needed a system that was 
flexible enough to let us properly configure a machine that we didn't have 
-- and didn't want -- full remote control over.

Since then we've seen config-package-dev adopted in various environments, 
including some where the configuration writers _are_ in full control of 
the end system. There are benefits to having your configuration system be 
part of your packaging system and integrate cleanly (we encourage being as 
complaint with Debian policy as possible), and we also have some features 
to make it easy to maintain slightly-customized configuration and adapt to 
new upstream configuration files. Since Debathena was originally 
student-developed, it was important that we be able to support multiple 
operating systems robustly with as little manual effort as possible.

I'd like to convince folks that the unique features of config-package-dev 
are desirable properties in a configuration-management system, and talk 
about systems we've built using config-package-dev and how these 
properties have made things easier. While I'm happy to get feedback about 
config-package-dev itself or get more adopters, and would of course talk 
about using our system, I'd also be very happy to see other systems 
integrate some of these features. The focus of my presentation would be on 
our experiences using and extending config-package-dev, and ways I think 
other systems could address some of the use cases we focus on.

About myself: I'm the most active current maintainer of the 
config-package-dev system. I was a Debathena developer as an MIT student; 
I now work at MokaFive, a desktop virtualization management company. We 
use config-package-dev in building MokaFive BareMetal, our platform for 
running virtual machines on a locked-down Ubuntu-based host platform.

More information about config-package-dev is available on our website at 
https://debathena.mit.edu/config-package-dev .

-- 
Geoffrey Thomas
geofft at mit.edu