New veewee/packer/bento etc.. template system

new-template-veewee.md

• We'd need a vendor neutral repo
• But maybe also are to add vendor repo (like ubuntu one, chef one) where every owns their set/part of the template, like plugins you can load
• I imagine the templates writing in a coding-neutral way (think moustache based templates)
• have them shared as gems, npm, etc.. packages for usage in each ecosystem
• provide a library that can generate (using vars/context) the templates you need (much like erb templates)
• these libraries can be easily written in each language ecosystem to generate templates
• so f.i. bento can use a gem to generate the templates specific with chef only in their repo
• besides the use as a library it should have a cli tool that can create these templates
• we can consider something like the homebrew system to store the templates in
• I think templates could benefit from meta-info that describe the vars that someone is able to set when generating a template
• so think more a generator tool that everybody could use in their own tool/ecosystem.
• be both windows/mac/linux usable

I guess what I’m actually saying is that I’d like to have both a unit test & integration test framework for these templates. I’ve had good luck so far experimenting with lashing server spec to packer. I’d also like to see some OS mocks as well (or at least an environment I could pre download in memory to accelerate testing).

Also, with the vision of VM, cloud, metal, container templates, I’d love it if I could say, take my VM template, and have a fairly good chance of saying it would work, on say Amazon by testing locally, without chewing up hundreds of hours on the service testing. This is why the cloud templates in particular are usually so terrible. People don’t want to pay to test them properly.