Interesting story. Enlightening, actually. Reminds me of how much I have yet to learn, as I learned to program in 2009 and got involved with Perl ten years later, so I missed many cases like this one you tell.

Thanks for mentioning Rex, BTW. I didn't know it. It seems to have a saner approach to configuration management, though I could only guess until actually using it for real cases. Not that I expect to use it in my current job. As you mention in Conflict in Teams, we need to disagree and commit, and I missed the "disagree part", as Ansible was already in place when I got there, so I got the "commit part" only (actually, it's funny to say "commit", as it's git-versioned, so "commit" takes more than one sense here).

Again, Ansible is not bad, just not my first choice for the kind of automation my team performs. It works very well for "standard tasks", and I'm sure that's why it was chosen in the first place. But as business rules get complex, it begins to show its shortcomings.

So, I'll put Rex "in my pockets", just in case I start something new.