Funny you should mention RPM's, since that's one of the packaging formats we perform configuration management in. I have my own configuration management framew

Funny you should mention RPM's, since that's one of the packaging formats we perform configuration management in. I have my own configuration management framework which can add and remove configuration from files that each package brings on. It's written in AWK. No knowledge is required to use it - configuration packages deliver just their configuration files' excerpts. In addition to being able to template them with regular shell variables, self-assembly is supported as well.