>I'm forced to wonder from your comments throughout this thread whether you have much real-world development experience, versus having just ingested a bunch of theoretical information on best practices. The things you're dismissing out of hand happen all the time, and while sometimes they're useless, more often they're all the documentation you'll get, and you'll feel exceedingly lucky to get even them.

This is highly arrogant comment. There was no need to be rude. I've been developing and working with actual data for over a decade now. Yes, in the real world sometimes comments are transmitted over the line but I'm sure you can agree that isn't a good idea. Yes, many times you don't get good documentation but you make it sound like that's acceptable and anyone who thinks otherwise doesn't have real-world experience.

In all honestly I would expect comments generated from some odd software packages but it's been an incredibly long time since I've seen data transmissions that contain comments. In environments dealing with petabytes of data you can't afford to send comments with every single file.

As for Puppet, I think you misunderstand my point. Yes, it is a root-level tool. That doesn't mean any user should have the same permissions as Puppet. Why wouldn't you simply place configuration files people shouldn't modify in places where they don't have permission but Puppet does? Honestly, I thought that was standard practice.