Hi Tom,

Am Wed, Aug 16, 2023 at 05:54:10PM +1000 schrieb wirelessduck--- via Dng:
> I would like to know if other people here have any experience running ansible on Devuan?
>
> Are there any issues with compatibility?

Using devuan provided ansible packages since a while now to configure some basic
stuff here: Kerberos, automounts, network config, passdb stuff for some
hosts. Currently still on chimaera. No issues so far :-) A bit outdated,
but doesn't matter for my tasks. Daedalus update will bring in newer stuff
of course.

> Would you suggest using an alternative to ansible instead, eg. puppet/bolt/Chef?

I once played with puppet (+10 years ago) Not much leftovers of it in my brain
since then. The main difference is: Puppet needs a server which by itself
needs java. On each machine a client software needs to be run as daemon. In contrast
to that ansible is run like a oneshot tool using a configuration folder.
It terminates when done. The tool can either run only locally, thus perform
changes on the current host or execute the commands on remote hosts via various
methods (SSH only beeing one of them) If you need periodic updates for ansible
you will have to explicitly setup a cron job or something like that. In
principle you can use ansible to configure a host even if it has no
network, just bring the configuration folder and required packages with
USB and run from stick. This is not possible with puppet.

ansible is much simpler and less resource consuming. A short try to read
current puppet documentation left me with more question marks than before
- could be related to my age anyways.

I love the template system with ansible. Its based on jjina2,
well documented & flexible.

Another thing i thought about once and then was to use self made
deb packages to configure my hosts. The post/pre install hooks
could be miss-used to do things, could also easily install
(config) files just by the default deb mechanism.
One could think of providing a local repository with such deb packages
categorized in use cases, sub use cased etc. Having apt to resolve
dependencies, installing software packages as needed. But I'm too lazy to
do this at the moment.

> What is the normal install method here? I can see the debian/Devuan package repository versions are a bit behind (not unexpected), but I can also install latest version from pypi directly with pip or bundle my own deb package with dh-virtualenv.

Just use the apt version. Should work for most cases. You can still
upgrade to recent pip version later but you have to keep up with
security updates explicitly then.

cheers,
Andreas

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