There is tooling that takes a stab at it, and is getting better (from the *nix world – Puppet, CFEngine, and Chef and from the Windows world – System Center Configuration Manager, Group Policy, among other third party application deployment platforms). These tools are all well and good, but they fall down when reaching across the OS divide. Puppet, Chef, and CFEngine (there are others as well, but these are some of the more popular) all have some cross platform support, but it feels unnatural (especially in module or recipe development). …