[msgodel]

As someone who's career has involved managing large numbers of deployed Linux and BSD machines: what's wrong with scripting? It's expressive, debugable, repeatable, easy to communicate about verbally and on wikis. If you want something that's more constrained there are tools like puppet and ansible.

I guess this is another one of those "smalltalk people" vs "unix people" talking past eachother because they have shared vocabulary with different implications kind of situations.

[jve]

Scripting is error prone and requires more skilled admins. Not so great if one wants to deploy Linux as a Desktop OS.