Every time I let the config management stuff slide slowly towards procedural, bad things have happened. You want your config management templates to be as decl

Every time I let the config management stuff slide slowly towards procedural, bad things have happened. You want your config management templates to be as declarative as possible. "This is the desired final state", and that's it. Of course, in practice it's very hard to stay 100% declarative, but it's very good practice to try and keep it close to ideal.