welcome to Arusha!

[Jim R. <jm...@qu...>]

So, after a *very* long lurking period, I finally got around to 
installing and using Arusha for real.  Y'all have done a great job -- I 
like it a lot so far.  (1 week)

Our team (humbly named "arik":) has at the moment  2 systems in  it; 
prototypes for SLES9 amd64 and Solaris 9.  Just now beginning to 
integrate it for real into our real world.  In the near future we'll 
have 50ish systems hooked in.  Initially we're just doing (open source 
tools) packages; but I anticipate growing from there.

I've got some questions/comments.. 

1.) A sidai suggestion: sidai/package/rsync.xml has a phrase in the 
<patch> section that names a bunch of rsync versions.  I think the sense 
of the test should be reversed, so it tests *for* [ "$PKG_VERSION" = 
"2.5.5" ] and defaults to : ok # no worries, mate.
(The "doesn't need a patch" list is already out of date, 2.6.6 is out 
and the build fails because of this...)

2.) Mostly a statement: the 'how do I migrate from the "try-ark" mode to 
a real site' instructions are .... lacking.  I got a bit frustrated 
trying to discover in which dark corner the magic config file that was 
causing certain behavior lived... turned out I had a mixture of old and 
new happening, and didn't know that, because of the level of magic 
involved.  At that early phase of maturity, this needs to be smoother.  
(I know -- send patches...  :)

3.) Newbie Q: what happens if a machine is down when a deploy/reveal 
command is issued?  Is there anything akin to "self-healing state 
management" in here?

4.) Anyone done any windows integration?    Thoughts in that direction?

5.) Are there any utilities/commands to report on the ark-state info?

6.) A sidai question: I built a version of gcc to go into /our; used the 
sidai template with just a couple of tiny tweaks.  It got 
installed/deployed in a somewhat unexpected manner -- in the deploy tree 
I have a whole tree of subdirectories, and (most of) the leaves are 
symlinks into the install tree.  A couple of things are directly stored 
in the deploy tree.  All the other apps I've done so far have the top of 
the deploy tree just symlinked to the top of the respective install tree. 
Is this expected, and if so -- what is the logic behind doing it this 
way; and what directive triggered the different install?

Thanks,
Jim