debtags as a way to install and manage classes of machines

[Erich Schubert]

Hi,
> And just to mention, I'm aware of solutions like puppet, cfengine and
> the like, but we'd like to  keep it as debian as possible because we
> already have quite a bit of infrastructure in place to manage things
> that way and it looks like with some tricks it should work just fine
> (maybe not with debtags tho, but rather with custom repository
> structures, don't know yet).

Actually cfengine works quite well with Debian.
IMHO the typical cfengine approach is exactly what you described, and
makes much more sense than 'tagging pacakges' so they are installed by
some automagic (which in turn would probably boil down to some
skript).

Debtags is meant about classifying packages based on their contents,
not based on your machines.
It should could be abused to do that, but it doesn't really gain you
anything compared to plain package installation lists.
IMHO.

best regards,
Erich Schubert