Anyone looked at TemplateTree II? It's a cfengine configuration preprocessor from Tobias Oetiker (the fellow who created RRDTool). It was discussed at LISA '01 by the author:

Paper: http://www.usenix.org/events/lisa01/tech/full_papers/oetiker/oetiker.pdf Home: http://isg.ee.ethz.ch/tools/isgtc/index.cgi?page=module_pod;module=tetre2;po...

There is also the System Configuration booklet from SAGE (Booklet #14) for a discussion, as well as a PDF from Gridweaver examining the various possibilities:

http://www.gridweaver.org/WP1/report1.pdf