mind the explanatory gap

If you’re a Mac IT person, and you don’t know about Greg Neagle’s Managing OS X blog, you need to fix that situation now.

One of the reasons Greg is so awesome in our field is that he’s eminently pragmatic, with enough hacker mentality to make sure he simply gets the job done with a minimum of fuss. His recent post on the trials and tribulations of working with the Adobe Enterprise Deployment Kit is a great example.

Not only is he trying to come up with something flexible enough to actually use efficiently, he’s dug into the innards and explained exactly what’s going on.

I talked to a few people at Puppet Camp last week about large scale Mac management, and everyone seemed really excited about the Munki Project, which is all Greg’s work so far. Basically the idea is to provide OS X with an actual repository for package management, using native Mac packages, and attempting to reuse vendor packages as much as is feasible.

If no-one else does it, I’ll end up putting together a munki type and provider for Puppet. I’m really looking forward to being able to simply do stuff like:

package { "iWork":
  ensure => latest,
}

just like other operating systems, letting the repository handle dependencies. The way it should be….

This really could be one of the most important community contributions to large scale Mac management in the history of OS X in my opinion.

Posted on October 8th, 2009 under macosx, puppet. RSS 2.0 feed. Leave a response, or trackback.