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So i promised i would speak english, in case, we don't know who's out there on the far reaches of the

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galaxy.

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so if that's ok with everyone, i'll continue in english.

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so the subject of configuration management

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is now pretty well known in the open source community and cfengine as a project has been around

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since 1993 as petter said, and it's still going strong and we're not running out of ideas any time soon.

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and so it's great to come here and actually summarize what's been going on in the last couple of years.

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because the last couple of years of cfengine have probably been one of the most active develeopment periods

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of cfengine as a whole.

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as some of you probably know, a couple of years ago we started a company to develop and support the future

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of cfengine,

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and since then it's been more resources to carry the project forward.

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so these are exciting times in terms of

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development of configuration management.

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So i thought i'd just start out by sketching out the problem

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of configuration managament for anyone who might not be completely familiar with it, and then i'll go

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into some of the history and explain some of the features of cfengine.

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so the challenge that i realized i back in 1993, is that we needed to separate the design of systems

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from the implementations of the systems.

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in pretty much the same way that today we separate design and implementation in many other areas in software

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design,

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implementation in web design, we have style sheets that take care of the look and feel,

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and then we have the implementation in terms of html.

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we can think of cfengine and configuration management tools in some ways being like style sheets for o

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perating systems somewhat, deciding how they should look.

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And the reason to separate them is pretty obvious, it's the classic argument that humans are really good at thinking

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and planning and designing.They're not really good at implementing stuff.

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we try to be consisting in the implementating of one or two systems, maybe you're lucking. 100 machines,

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forget it.

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1000 machines, you're probably dead by then anyway.

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machines are really good at doing consitant implementation and not very good at desiging or planning.

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So separating of duties is a good state of affairs. So that's pretty much the idea.

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and as i say, it's like stylesheets of the web, we're trying to separate how we want things to look and

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from how we want things to be implemented.

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The difference of course between stylesheets and systems is that your web pages aren't usually changing

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behind your back.