~~ zoa doesn't pretend ~~

this section is a rant that i'll convert into a blog post tbh

chef & ansible & puppet & salt all pretend to be
fully idempotent & declarative, but leave
actual declarative-ness and idempotence as
an exercise to the user.

  zoa doesn't pretend. zoa is not idempotent. zoa
  is not declarative. it assumes your state changes
  over time, and zoa makes it easy to keep up with those
  changes. you won't have to look at horrible doc websites
  or commit a week to learning a god
                                   damned
                                    stupid
                                      DSL

other config management systems make their users
feel stupid.

  zoa doesn't. zoa uses shell scripts like every
  single linux distro has used for millenia. it
  has exactly zero dependencies besides zoa itself.

  zoa adheres to standards, and uses well-known
  distro conventions.

  zoa is easy. and simple. and honestly,
  quite a smol guy

the other tools want to do a lot - search across
your nodes, deploy via their tooling, automate
testing, manage AWS resources?!?!?  

  zoa is only concerned with _managing configuration_

  _on servers_

  and nothing else. forever.

the other tools break constantly because they
try to do everything.

  zoa breaks rarely because it does almost nothing.

other tools are slow because they have HUGE runtimes and scopes

  zoa is comparatively fast, because it's just running god dang
  shell scripts :3
  zoa doesn't require:
  - ssh
  - python
  - ruby
  - a chef server or salt master

other tools abstract too much

  zoa abstracts a few definitely useful functions, but
  otherwise gets out of the way and gives you a light
  framework to speak shell to your systems.

  in zoa, you write plain POSIX shell. Why?
  - posix shell is productive!
  - posix shell is portable!
  - posix shell is the language of system configuration!
  - posix shell is easy to remember!
  - posix shell rarely changes!