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On, even better, you use a bash script or a little bit of Python.

Ansible is a lot of python that's already been written, battle tested, and made available to use. Once you get beyond one box or need to deploy and tweak something more than once, getting an ansible config setup is much easier in the long run.

> Ansible is a lot of python

One more reason to stay away from it. The codebase is very complex and the issues labeled "bug" count more than 18 thousands!

The language is a kludge of yaml and jinja with custom chunks of Python that is much less expressive than pure Python.

Go ahead and downvote at will.

it’s an entirely usable system that can be used as shell script replacements to full virtual machine provisioning.

it does not matter if the language is a “kludge” if it suits the purpose. Ansible suits a lot of purposes and is worth exploring as a free technology.

...and dropbox is just an rsync script, Google docs is just vim/emacs (delete as appropriate) over ssh, and FF VII is just a doom clone /s

Ansible gives a framework that covers several of the gotchas your bash + python hack would run into.

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