I use packages to configure my system. Each package depends on the application packages that it configures, and contains the configuration files. (The repository lives at https://github.com/majewsky/system-configuration.)
My impression is that building configuration packages using the native packaging tools (in my case PKGBUILD files, since I'm on Arch Linux) is unnecessarily cumbersome. To package a configuration file with a single line of content, I have to put the file in my repository, reference the file in the PKGBUILD's sources, and install the file in the PKGBUILD's install() routine. (This is not specific to Arch Linux, I just used it as an example since that's what I use ATM.)
Are there options for streamlining this process? Something like a package description format targeted at configuration packages, where you have a single description file containing all the dependencies and configuration files, which can be processed into a configuration package with a single command.
[EDIT: To clarify, I'm not looking for any of the classic configuration management tools, like Puppet/Chef/Ansible/Salt/cfEngine. I consider every one of these too fat and built my own, Holo (http://holocm.org) which extends arbitrary system package managers to also handle configuration. The only thing that I find lacking in this approach is that it is relatively tedious to set up a build process for system packages that only contain a handful static files.]
If the answer is no, I'll build it myself, but I figure some investigation into prior art is useful. My googling didn't turn up anything useful so far.
#!/bin/shand be over within a dozen lines. You don't really expect someone to release that as a tool, do you?arch-linuxtag above (since different linux distros use different package management systems, this is not really a generic/global *nix question), I noticed a tag for makepkg -- dunno if that is good enough, but if not you might want to add, "Yes I know aboutmakepkgbut this soup is too hot!"