As I mentioned in another comment, I'm not suggesting using m4 with/in-place of ansible -- rather as a compliment to the shell. I suppose one could use jinja2 stand-alone with the shell -- but then you get the python dependency etc... I meant that m4 might be a better fit to go along with bash/ksh.

Eg:

  dpkg-query --show \
  --showformat='${Package;6} ${Installed-Size;4}^L\n' \
  m4 python2.7-minimal dash bash mksh ksh \|
  sort -n -k2

    dash  212
      m4  382
    mksh  878
     ksh 3110
    bash 3941
  python 5456

(Not that you can avoid python-minmal on Debian - but in a chroot you might, etc).

As for can and cannot do, consider this "feature" of m4:

  $ cat <<eof|m4 -Dme=you -Dpredictable=surprise
  me=predictable
  eof

  you=surprise

Again, I'm not suggesting m4+dash is a great idea vs ansible -- just clarifying a couple of things...

If we're discussing templating languages, I definitely prefer Mako over Jinja2 and think it's much more appropriate for devops templating. But Jinja2 is the default in a lot of projects, including Saltstack and Ansible, and it's hard to fight the currents all the time.

If you're going to use shell and not ansible, then why not use shell with m4. I'm not suggesting shell+m4 is better than ansible, or that ansible+m4 (wtf?! right?) would be a good idea.

Just why not use a readily available template/macro language along with shell scripts, if you've decided to use shell scripts.

I suppose you could use jinja and bash -- but why pull in two full interpreters as a dependency?