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From: Andrew Schulman <schulman DOT andrew AT epamail DOT epa DOT gov>
Subject:  Puppet in Cygwin [ping Reini]
Date:  Fri, 27 Nov 2009 14:15:05 -0500
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It would be great to port Puppet to Cygwin.  

Puppet's scope on a Cygwin host is going to be more limited than on Linux,
just because Cygwin's scope is limited.  Puppet could easily manage
Cygwin's file and services, but managing Windows files and services would
take more work because the environment is so different.  And as for Windows
packages-- forget it.  Windows can't even manage those!

Still, just automating deployment and configuration of the Cygwin
environment would be a good place to start and would very helpful.

I think that the main hurdle is likely to be package management.  Someone
would have to create a package management back end for Cygwin.  Should it
be based on setup.exe?  setup's package management capabilities appear to
be very small.  cyg-apt (http://code.google.com/p/cyg-apt/) is another
possibility.

As for services, with luck Puppet should be able to manage Cygwin init
services OOTB.  Windows services would take more work but probably wouldn't
be too bad.

File management might require an extra parameter for text vs. binary mounts
(ugh), but should work as is otherwise.

Anyone else interested in this?  There's a still-small wiki page about
Puppet in Cygwin at http://reductivelabs.com/trac/puppet/wiki/PuppetCygwin.
If you are interested, please start contributing there.

Andrew.


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