When we last left off, I had sketched out a config file for fedora-pack, then neglected it when I finally accepted that Perl is dying.

Seven months later, fedora-pack is undergoing a rewrite to Python. It’s equally widespread (or easy to install) and includes a ton of batteries. I’ve always liked that.

But that’s only half the change. I’ve been trying to simplify and streamline the code, to make it more straightforward even at the expense of some flexibility and testability—there are, after all, no tests, no extensions, and no users. As far as I know.

That’s resulted in a rather different codebase, because of two realizations:

1. At work, I don’t use the multi-version capability. What if make_provisioner just installs the platform’s default version? It would have to know a lot less about distros and versions.
2. At work, our bundled scripts install our own necessary packages (such as git) in addition to the core languages. What if make_provisioner doesn’t bother offering package preinstallation? On the one side of the process is cloud-init, if preinstallation is important. On the other, the runner script can install its own choice of language packages. Now make_provisioner doesn’t even have to care about distros (or features or packages) at all, as long as it can have a distro-agnostic SFX stub.

Things seem to be going well so far; expect a code dump on github by November. I want to use cloud-maker for work’s AMI builder, instead of a hacked fedora-pack fork, and the Ubuntu 15.10 release will be a good time to change that.