4 ms·

I can't speak about Chef, but Ansible is as far removed from declarative as is possible when compared to guix and nix.

• XorNot 1y ago
  And thank god for that. I'm very thoroughly over declarative management systems: the world isn't declarative, and all these systems are only as good as their implementation. Ansible at least doesn't lie to you about this: it provides the tools to be declarative, but doesn't pretend to understand your problems better then you.
  • matrss 1y ago
    Opinions differ, I guess. Ansible can't declare a desired state of anything at all and apply it, so I don't see much of a point in it over shell-scripts-over-ssh, other than maybe making decisions based on its fact gathering (but at the cost of having to deal with the yaml boilerplate).
    • chickensong 1y ago
      Agreed Ansible isn't fully declarative like some other tools, but the variable management, roles, template engine, and integrated vault, are a big improvement from shell-scripts-over-ssh. Also in some cases, having yaml structure can be a good thing. Handing a pile of shell spaghetti to a new hire and expecting them to reason about it is less than ideal.