> The idea behind Pets is that Configuration Management of individual hosts shouldn’t be harder than administering the system by hand.
Just administer it by hand and back it up.
Just administer it by hand and back it up.
Why do you have a "documented pipeline" for your laptop?
And I never bother keeping notes, I just back it up so that the whole thing is recoverable.
You're getting away from having a pet then.
And once you consider that you might have a third laptop for something work related and be able to duplicate the base configuration then you no longer have pets and you just need configuration management.
That isn't even the common use case of most IT professionals, much less most laptop users.
Some people like gardening, although they will never get to "sell produce" at the vegetables market. That doesn't mean gardening is bad, it just means they enjoy it and enjoy wasting their time doing gardening. Other people just go and buy vegetables at the supermarket that were grown at commercial farming.
Same with doing configuration management on your laptop, if you really want to enjoy it, go for it. For most people its a complete waste of time and a useless activity compared to the alternative, which is changing the few files you need changing by hand, and backing it up to solve the "lost my work" problem.
For gardening though I can garantee you that homegrown fruits and vegetables can be far superior to anything you can find at the supermarket, so would argue the end result is not the same.
Maybe a better example would be using hand tools versus power tools -- if one takes the expense of power tools out of the equation.
The visibility of the changes aren't a virtue in themselves, it is only when you do something with them that they become useful.
Spending hours documenting my build system for my pet laptop to save myself 60 seconds a few times a year isn't a good payoff for me. If the payoff is that you also learn configuration management along the way, then that's fine.
(I also don't quite understand how you're testing and validating your build system for your laptop without periodically wiping it and reprovisioning it -- and once you start considering things like that I definitely don't have enough time for all that)