Quoting Craig Sanders (cas@taz.net.au):
if BeefTaco does the same/similar thing but open source, then I may switch to that instead.
Just to be clear, BeefTaco is a revival of the very simple Targeted Advertising Cookie Opt-Out (TACO) idea, which was merely a set of preemptive HTTP cookie you install with effectively infinite expire times, to block known obnoxious HTTP cookies through the simple expedient of a cookie of the same name (but harmless contents) already being there. All of Abine's products in my experience attempt to be a great deal more featureful than that. And I vaguely recall that they did exactly that with TACO when they took it proprietary (though i might be misremembering). Anyway, BeefTaco is a follow-on to (a revival of) TACO -- not of do-not-track. When I looked for a new version of TACO and found that the developer site was gone and redirected me to something more grandiose at a firm called Abine, I was at first pretty cynical and was prepared to think the worst of them, but soon figured out that they're genuinely good and helpful people. So, I managed to avoid looking like an open-source crank and zealot by keeping my mouth shut until I knew the whole story. Lucky me.
it's my generic solution to the "I'm bored of making yet another yank-paste-edit config stanza" problem - convert to a simple format for the variable data, a perl script, and a makefile.
I might have to get serious about improving my facility with Perl, at which I still suck, having gotten by with sed/awk/etc. for a dog's age. Yes, I know, past time to get comfortable with the sysadmin's Swiss Army knife. I could trot out excuses, but they wouldn't be interesting.
it's part of the reason why i never got all that excited by puppet or chef - they just didn't seem all that revolutionary.
Indeed not. My percepti8on, FWIW: Chef is not a good idea unless you are really comfortable at writing ruby routinely. I.e., it's developer-focussed. Puppet is the other way; it's sysadmin-focussed. That's a vague handwave, but in my experience generally true.
might be time for another search for an alternative to puppet....hmmm, this looks like a good starting list.
Have a look at ansible if you want to see a fresh and well-balanced approach. http://www.ansibleworks.com/