1y ago

Sparky - simple and efficient alternative to Ansible - Alexey Melezhik

dev.to

Sparky - simple and efficient alternative to Ansible

5 comments

TL;DR: the project is nice and welcome, most of development reasons seem straw man arguments ("I wanted to do it" would have been better).
- I haven't ever used Ansible but I have used a project that also made the boneheaded decision to use templated YAML. That cost me several hours of debugging...
  This is goes with the previous point, and this is a subjective argument too: if YAML is enough for a task, there is no price to pay, at any time; if YAML is not enough, there has been a miscalculation during the tool choice.
  Well, yeah I think he's saying that Ansible is the wrong tool and he's making a better one. It's also not just that YAML isn't "enough for a task". It's extremely error-prone and add unhygienic templates onto an already janky language is just asking for trouble.
  most of development reasons seem straw man arguments ... I have some counter-arguments
  Tbf you agreed with half the points you quoted...
  I think the biggest problem with this replacement is the choice of Raku. That's a super niche and quite weird language that nobody is going to want to learn. I would have probably used Typescript or maybe Dart.
  
  Well, yeah I think he’s saying that Ansible is the wrong tool and he’s making a better one. It’s also not just that YAML isn’t “enough for a task”. It’s extremely error-prone and add unhygienic templates onto an already janky language is just asking for trouble.
  Fair enough, I guess I have never had to use Ansible for big enough projects where these kinds of error spring up more frequently.
  Tbf you agreed with half the points you quoted…
  Well, the only one that I agree completely with is the stdout/stderr one. All the others have some kind of caveat that prevents me to support OP claims.
  In any case, on the language choice we are in agreement: as of now Raku is not a popular language, so requiring a user of the system to know the language cannot provide much appeal to the project.