My understanding is that this is not so much for a single course (where a VM would be a good solution) as for general student research. Prepackaged works less well there (though may still be made to work).
> If he decides to ignore all the tools (puppet, chef, scripts, etc.) designed to make all of this easier, that's his fault.
You're kidding here, right?
I find Puppet and Chef superconfusing and not worth the effort to learn at my job right now, and I'm a fucking programmer by hobby and profession. This is exactly the kind of bullshit people doing science should never have to deal with.
Puppet, at least, is pretty straightforward. You are describing what you want your system to look like. Puppet takes that description and makes your system look like that.
People doing science who want to use computers should expect to have to learn a thing or two about using them. As in more than using Word if they want to do complex, custom, not-done-before tasks. Much like people who want to do novel things in chemistry should expect to learn more than how to make black powder.
This guy is upset that novel things haven't already been thought of and planned for by the people who make shiny GUIs. This is a farcical position. If it's really that novel, of course nobody's written a GUI for it.
Point is, tools to address his problem already exist. He dismisses them, because they don't do it in an arbitrarily flexible and powerful way while still being infinitely iTunes-y.
> People doing science who want to use computers should expect to have to learn a thing or two about using them.
A thing. Or two. Not half-a-year-worth of full-stack dev education many.
He is not complaining about having to learn things. He's complaining about having to learn irrelevant things. Infrastructure. He wants to make a soup, and he's being asked to run his own plumbing to get water, and to drill his own gas for heating. And people here are saying he should stop complaining, because nobody is making him build his own drill - it's already provided via Puppet script in a Git repository.
He doesn't dismiss tools because there ain't iTunes-y. He dismisses them, because to use those tools he has to learn more tools, for which he has to learn even more tools, and all that effort is throwaway, because the next time he will need to learn different toolchains (or should I say, tooltrees with stupidly high branching factors).
> Puppet, at least, is pretty straightforward. You are describing what you want your system to look like. Puppet takes that description and makes your system look like that.
It makes sense for a team of web developers doing high-scalability applications. It is bullshit for a researcher who just wants to crunch some numbers with a bit of Python code.
There's the problem. He doesn't understand what the proper bounds of relevance are. He can't see how a given task is relevant, so it's bullshit. That's more a comment on the limits of his thought processes than anything else.
He wants to do novel things. This means going places where not everything is preconfigured for his pleasure. It also means he needs to know how to use his tools, because when he runs off the edge of what point-and-drool does for him he will need them.
He asks for a world where point-and-drool covers everything. All I can say is that what he asks is impossible for what he wants.
