[Infrastructures] state machines

[Daniel Hagerty]

 > Without getting into "which is better," which is more likely to have
 > the CNAME dependency problem?

    I believe we've covered this already.  Either can demonstrate the
problem in the end result.

    Any path involving execution has an additional peril of
demonstrating this flavor of problem during execution.  The math that
demonstrates the relatively complexity of the two is trivial, should
we need to see it.

    In truth, even the straight up restore image has an execution
phase subject to all the usual perils, but I think we can take it as a
given that it works in practice.

 > On the one hand, it's hard to disagree that different solutions are
 > useful in different situations.  Your opacity statement is just hand
 > waving, tho.  Discussing which specific situations are more amenable
 > to which specific solutions would be useful.

    That is not a handwave, I just write coming from a highly
abstracted thought process.

    An image backup is a representation of "what" where the "how" that
produced the what is lost.  This is both its strength, and its
weakness.  By contrast, an execution method produces that "what" from
the "how", leaving both to be inspected, debugged, etc.

    Do you disagree that the removal of potentially essential
information increases an image's opacity while also making it simpler?


    If you want specific situations to show how the the difference
between "what" and "how" matter, you should have enough on hand to
generate them, rather than relying on me writing poorly written
examples that lend themselves to being misconstrued.