Sys::Facter -- new module

[Stachu 'Dozzie' K.]

Hello group,
I want to publish a new module Sys::Facter. It's a module for detecting
various information about operating system, similar to Facter utility
used by Puppet: one can define own plugins that will be used by
Sys::Facter.


ALTERNATIVES

Sys::Info
Fetch information about the host system.

pfacter
pfacter is a collection of perl scripts used to collect and display
facts about an operating system.


RATIONALE

The target users of Sys::Facter are sysadmins. Sys::Facter is intended
to provide them an easy-to-use infrastructure for detecting various
things (so called "facts"), like number of CPUs, amount of RAM,
partitions and LVM devices, NFS exports, SSH public keys, occupied
TCP/UDP ports and so on.

Such data could be then collected in a centralized place e.g. for
keeping an inventory, used for generating configuration files or to
calculate server load for load balancers.

Some pre-defined modules would be available, but the most important
thing is that sysadmin could easily add his own "facts", as a single
developer can't think of every possible variable to be detected.

While Sys::Info does a quite goot work in detecting parameters, it can't
easily be extended by user and hence it's not usable this way. On the
other hand, it could be used as a backend for Sys::Facter plugins.

A good way would be to use Pfacter module. It provides a sensible API
for plugins that fits to above-mentioned usage. Unfortunately, Pfacter
practically doesn't have a usable documentation and its API for building
tools on top of it is horrible.

Sys::Facter utilizes Pfacter plugin API, while providing easier API for
tools and contains POD documentation for both interfaces.


Any comments would be welcome, especially those pointing already-written
Perl modules that fit to provided use case. I'd rather like to use
someone else's work.

--
Secunia non olet.
Stanislaw Klekot