Planet Binder

calculator second hand…

[...]Comparison Shopping for Postfix Puppet Modules – Obsolete Your Idols[...]…

If you know anything about me, you know that I’m almost painfully lazy, to the point that I will put hours of effort into avoiding doing work. Case in point: I wanted to build myself a Postfix server or a hundred, using Puppet. Well, that’s probably pretty easy, just grab the Package type and alter the config files, then stash them in the catalog as File types, cut, print, that’s a wrap. But oh man, that’s like 30 minutes of work. How tedious. Can’t somebody else do it? SingTFW to the rescue.

Cursory searches turned up 5 public git repositories containing Puppet modules to manage Postfix. Success! But, too much success! How could I pick the right one? I had some rough idea of what I wanted the one I used to do but maybe I’d overlooked some important feature. I’d better compare them. To start us off, here’s the list in the order the search found them.

• camptocamp on github
• example42 on github
• ghoneycutt on github
• deck on github
• riseup-shared

So I did what any self-respecting lazy person would, I fired off 5 clones in parallel and went to force  a machine to make me coffee.

Once everything was in place, I started doing tree and diff in various places to get a feel for how the repos were laid out, which features were visible in module names, which systems were supported. The very first thing I noticed is that the deck and riseup repos are virtually identical, and so I surmise lazily that the latter is built upon the former. This also meant that I can eliminate deck from consideration in favor of riseup. So now there were four.

But now it’s time to drink that coffee.